“Maybe the source of it all doesn't matter,” I say and I mean this. I force myself to my feet and try not to stumble. I'm tired, mentally and physically. “Maybe it's a disease or a fungus or an ethereal punishment, I don't know, but who cares? All that matters is that we get through this.” I turn to Holly and glance sidelong at Martin. “So what do we do?”
“In my dream,” Holly says and in my heart, I hear her ominous words ringing like a death knell. “I had a dream. You were in it, only you were dead.” I keep the morbid thought to myself, certain that Holly is already aware of it. “I didn't see Galen's mother, so that's where we're going. I want to break the memories, make them false. If things keep going the way I saw them, then you're all gong to die.” I notice that she doesn't say 'we.' Holly doesn't say we're all going to die. I look down at the ground.
“No,” Martin says and I glance up quickly. He's shaking his head and straightening his T-shirt. “What we should be doing is commandeering a vehicle and gathering supplies, especially weapons. Think for just a second about all the zombie movies you've ever seen.”
“This isn't a goddamn movie!” Holly shouts at him and I see that her brow is set in that determined line that I'm so used to. Once it gets there, there's no way to smooth it out. Holly will get her way, no matter the consequences. “Galen and I are going to his mother's house. You can stay or follow, I don't care.” She spins around on her heel and starts off through the park, gesturing for me to follow. I don't say a word, just move forward so that I can wrap my hand in hers. Moments later, footsteps join us. When I glance over my shoulder, I see that both Dawson and Martin are there. I can't imagine that they wouldn't follow Holly. The world would follow Holly if they could see her. She has an inner strength that glows like the sun. It attracts everyone around her like moths to a flame.
“Maybe after we visit Galen's mother … ” Martin says and I hear a growl from behind me. When I look over my shoulder, I see that it's not a zombie, just Dawson. Martin is annoying, true, but I can see that Dawson is using him like a punching bag, directing all his anger and his frustration at the kid. I ignore them both.
“Are they really zombies?” I ask Holly and she shrugs, keeping her eyes scanning back and forth like a laser. She expects more of them at any moment. I can see that, plain as day, and it scares the shit out of me.
“My dream was silent,” Holly says and then tries to smile. Again, I can see that it's fake, but I return it, hoping to keep her calm and collected until she gets the chance to cry. Then it can be my turn to take care of her, hold her and brush her hair back, give her something to live for. When my dad died, she did the same for me. I want to return that favor. I want to marry Holly. I choke back tears and bite my lip. “Except for one word,” she says and her brow is pinched and tight like she's thinking really hard about something.
“What?” I ask and it takes her the entire walk through the park to tell me. She pauses at the second bridge, the one that spans a small creek and turns to face me, blue eyes wide and fearful.
“DeadBorn,” she says and her voice quivers just a bit. “She said DeadBorn.”
CHAPTER 5
Repudiation
Five Hours and Fifteen Minutes After …
A one hour bike ride turns into a three hour march across the city. For the first hour or so, we don't encounter anything out of the ordinary, and I think we all begin to question what we saw. Well, all of us but Holly. She keeps walking, shoulders back, chest high. Her eyes hold this determination that never sways, not even when we walk through crowds of people and cross busy streets.
I think Dawson especially wants to believe that he's imagined everything, that his mother will be alive when he gets home, that things can just go back to the way they were when he went to sleep last night. I don't blame him, not a bit. I want the same thing for Holly. I want what happened to be a terrible dream, something that will fade away by the evening when we sit down to dinner with Mr. and Mrs. Arget, and I wash the dishes while Holly rubs my back in comforting circles.
Then I see the black and silver light again.
It's flickering at the edge of the brush, a fleeting burst of color that fades away as quickly as it came.
“Did you see that?” Martin asks and seconds later, out of the bushes, a homeless man stumbles, jacket dirty and stained with blood. He lunges for Dawson and pauses only when Holly smashes him in the face with her baseball bat.
“Run!” she screams and we all bolt out of the small park and into the street where I'm nearly run over by a bus. Holly kisses my face a hundred times on the other side and then we run. And run. And run.
Now the four of us are standing outside of my house and my mother's car is parked in the driveway.
“That's a good sign,” I tell Holly as we approach the front door and I try the knob. It's locked. I knock quickly and we all wait in tense anticipation. Nothing happens. Moments pass and Holly rings the doorbell. Still, nothing. We both knock again as hard as we can and then we shout and jump up and down. “Let's try the back,” I say finally. I go the way I went when I took my bike yesterday and climb the stairs to the guest room balcony. The door there is locked, too, so I crawl onto the roof with Holly in tow. Dawson and Martin sit at my mother's bistro table and tell us they'll wait. I can only hope that they won't have killed each other by the time we get back. When I reach my bedroom window, I can already tell that something is wrong. There's a bottle of wine on my bed next to several empty bottles of pills. “Mom,” I say as I jump into the room and take off down the hallway. I pause suddenly and I realize that I've left Holly, but when I turn around to go back for her, she's already there, standing right behind me. “Help me,” I say and she nods. We search the upstairs and find nothing.
When we get downstairs, the house is quiet. That's unusual for my mother. She lives off my father's life insurance and she's always home with the stereo or the T.V. on for company. The fact that daytime talk shows aren't blaring into the room is a sign that something is definitely wrong. I take Holly's hand in mine and approach the garage. Both the door from the kitchen to the garage and the door from the garage to the backyard are open. I move down the cement steps and let Holly sweep the room like a police officer, bat held high over her shoulder. Once she determines that everything is clear, we lock both doors and go upstairs to bring Martin and Dawson inside.
“My mother isn't here,” I say, but that's about all I can determine. The wine and the pills suggest that something bad has happened yet there's no body. There's also no signs of blood or of a struggle, no forced entry. Obviously, Mom left of her own accord yet she didn't take the car. I don't know what to make of the situation, so I sit down heavily on the edge of the guest bed and try to take deep, calming breaths. Holly turns on the T.V. and switches to the news before disappearing into the hallway. When she comes back, she has my laptop in hand.
“We need to see how bad this thing is,” she says as she sits down next to me. I watch the pretty reporter talk about about a kitten that was rescued from a drain pipe and wonder why the fuck she isn't talking about the hordes of undead monsters sweeping across our city. Watercrest isn't a metropolis or anything like that, but it's no backwoods village either. I watch absently as Holly's eyes scan the computer screen.
“There's nothing here,” she says as she shakes her head. “Nothing.” Holly pauses and puts the laptop aside before going for the phone. I realize that none of us have our cellphones and think how useless they really are in a crisis. There was no time to grab one in the heat of things. I thank the universe that my mother likes corded phones from the eighties and watch as Holly calls 911. After a moment, she puts the phone down and nibbles at her lower lip. “Busy signal,” she says before any of us can ask. The woman's actions with the cellphone earlier suddenly make a whole lot more sense. She couldn't get through either.
“How could there be all of this … ” Dawson pauses, doesn't know quite how to phrase what he's thinking and curses instead. “Shit goin
g on and nobody knows it? Are we all going fucking crazy?” he asks. Martin is already shaking his head. He stands up and looks around at all of us, eyes scanning ours slowly and carefully. It's a bit overdramatic, but I remind myself that this morning, I saw a zombie-demon with a fire face melt a car and decide that if he wants to put his hands on his hips and pretend he's in a movie, who I am to argue with that?
“We're not crazy,” Martin says confidently. “But we do need to get out of here and fast.”
“Why?” Holly asks and she sounds exasperated. She gestures at Dawson and he passes the bag of food and weapons to me, so I can pass them to her. She digs around for awhile, comes up with a bag of candy corn and starts to cry silently. Nobody says a thing about it.
“You're certain there's nothing?” Martin asks as he moves over to the bed. I stand up and let him have my place. “Not even a single blog post? A profile update? Anything?” Holly shrugs and Martin grabs the laptop. “May I?” I shrug and move onto the balcony. I could care less about a stupid piece of plastic at this point.
I look out across the city and hope that I'll spot something interesting, but I can't see anything from here except suburbia. Nothing looks amiss. The old man down the street is even mowing his lawn.
“Why does it matter anyway?” Dawson asks as he grabs a dusty silk flower from its vase and twirls it around in his fingers. “Obviously, if people were really dying, it'd be all over the Internet. We wouldn't have to search very hard for it.” He sounds kind of relieved at this, like it's a good thing to be crazy. I guess with the alternative already laid out before me, I'd have to agree with him. I'd rather spend some time in a padded cell than on the run from undead monsters.
“No, see,” Martin says as he licks his lips again. “If it isn't here then it means it's definitely happening. I mean like, one hundred percent happening and the government knows about it.”
“Oh come the fuck on!” Dawson shouts as he throws the flower. The big, pink petals catch the air and it doesn't go very far, falling to the floor gently in a puff of dust. His violent gesture ruined, Dawson stands up and starts to pace. “Magic, zombies and government conspiracies don't really work for me.”
“But Christian mythology does?” Holly asks and she sounds bitter and angry and tired.
“Go to hell,” Dawson says as he bends down and pulls several guns from the bag. “I am fucking out of here. This is nuts.”
“Wait!” Martin says as he puts the computer aside and stands up. “You should come with us, at least until we get out of town.”
“Why?” Dawson growls, already halfway to the door. I can see in his eyes that he's made up his mind not to believe what Martin is about to say. I know now why he and Holly didn't last long. They're both too stubborn to coexist with anyone like-minded.
“Having a little bit of news or a lot of news makes sense but no news? Someone's removing or blocking anything to do with what's happening on the west side of town.” Dawson sneers and flips Martin the finger. Without listening to another word, he disappears around the bend in the hallway and soon after, we hear his footsteps pounding down the stairs.
“Why would they do that?” I ask as Martin glances over at me. His brown curls are stuck to the sweat on his forehead.
“Because,” he says and he licks his lips again. The gesture is already starting to bother me, but I can see that it's a way for him to cope with the stress, so I let it go. “Somebody, I don't know who or what, knows what's happening. They're either going to quarantine us or blow us up.”
“Did you learn that from The Walking Dead, too?” Holly says and I think she was trying to sound mean, but she just sounds sad. Her mouth is full of candy corn, but she keeps talking. “Maybe we should go to the CDC and wait for a rocket to blow us all up.”
“I'm not kidding!” Martin yells as he rises to his feet and nearly trips on the bag. “If they're covering it up, it's for a reason. We need to get out of town now.” Holly nods her head like she already knew this was our best option, Martin's advice aside.
“I know a place,” she says as she rises to her feet. “My dad sometimes does a little work at the wildlife refuge. It's about forty miles outside of town. It should be a good place to hole up for a little while.” I don't ask what happens next. I don't want to know. “I've got the security code memorized so – ” Holly's words are cut off by a series of gunshots from downstairs. The three of us grab whatever weapons are closest and race out of the room.
We find Dawson with the front door open and a pistol clutched between his shaking fingers. Outside on the front lawn is a bloody lump, like a small pig or a dog or something.
“What happened?” Holly asks, but Dawson doesn't answer. His face is pale and there's blood on his cheeks and neck. They're just spatters and I can tell that they're not his, but whatever it was that he just shot has left him traumatized. Martin keeps his back to us and his eyes on the living room. I secretly commend him for that. He might be a geek, but he's picked up a few good tricks from his video games. Figuring that someone's going to have to go outside and look, I move forward and hope that none of the neighbors comes over to investigate. “Careful,” Holly warns as I approach the quivering thing.
When I get close enough, I kick it over with my rain boot and scream.
Holly's by my side in less time than it takes me to close my mouth, breathe, and scream again. She looks down at the thing and I can see that she's wrestling with a hundred different emotions. I can understand why. The creature looks like a baby or even a fetus maybe. An umbilical cord is wrapped around its throat and its skin is red and blotchy. When it opens its mouth, it gurgles and I swear to myself that it's saying Holly's name.
“It came right at me,” Dawson says from the doorway. “And it was floating.”
I stare down at the baby and catch a flicker of that black and silver light again. Seconds later and it starts to rise from the grass, just as Dawson said. It isn't until it's sitting in the air before us like a piñata that Holly raises her baseball bat, pulls back her arms, and swings.
CHAPTER 6
Malodorous
Seven Hours and Thirty-Two Minutes After …
The four of us take my mother's blue sedan with the broken seat belts and load it up with food, blankets, clothing, tools, and weapons. When it's as packed as it can get, we lock up the house and slide furniture in front of the doors. Martin says this is a precaution in case we have to come back to the area. He says this helps deter people from breaking in and also give us a better hint if anyone, or any zombie for that matter, is hiding inside. I don't buy it for a second, but we all need tasks to occupy our minds, so I do it anyway.
When we finally squeeze into the car, Holly gets into the driver's seat and I take shotgun. Martin and Dawson sit in the back and don't talk to one another.
“How many types of DeadBorn are there do you think?” Martin asks as if we're playing a trivia game. Nobody answers so he just keeps talking. Most people would've just shut their mouths but not Martin. “When I got up to pee this morning, I noticed this woman climbing over the fence in my backyard. I watched her thinking she was like, a burglar or something when she fell and landed on the ground. Her bone just came right through the skin on her arm. When I opened the window to ask if she needed help, she got up and just came right at me, so I closed it and watched her run. She kind of … ” I look over my shoulder and watch Martin imitate the strange, loping movements of the zombies I'd seen on the hill that morning. After about thirty seconds, I realize that he isn't going to stop until someone supplies a word. I don't think Dawson can handle anymore of Martin's pretend groans, so I step in and try to diffuse the situation.
“Loped?” I ask and Martin nods vigorously like we're in the middle of a game of Pictionary.
“Yeah, loped. And anyway, her face was all bloody and half her jaw was missing. I knew then what we were dealing with.”
“And you didn't even think to bring your zombie preparedness kit?” Dawson asks as
he flutters a hand up by his throat. Martin rolls his eyes in response but keeps talking.
“Anyway, some of these DeadBorn or zombies or walkers or whatever they are seem a bit different than what I'm used to. When I first got outside, I saw one that spewed green ooze over everything. It was kind of like that stuff on Nickelodeon. You know, that Gak or whatever it is? Whatever it touched just disintegrated. I stayed away from that one.”
“Is it true,” I ask Martin, but I glance at Holly to make sure she's okay. Her gaze is focused out the window and it's kind of cloudy. I'm wondering if the grief and the stress is catching up to her. If she goes into shock, I'm taking her to a hospital whether she wants me to or not. “That if you get bitten, you turn into one, too?” Martin shrugs.
“It's a pretty common theme, so I'd say, just to be cautious, that we should kind of presume that's a yes.” I think about the bone bag's teeth that morning and wonder if I was just inches away from turning into a DeadBorn myself. “But I didn't see anyone get bitten. I mean, everyone that I ran into just got slaughtered outright. They – ”
Dawson is leaning forward and grabbing Martin by the arm before I can stop him. In his opposite hand is a knife that he presses to the chubby boy's throat.
“If you don't shut the fuck up, I swear to god that I will kill you.”
Nobody speaks for a long time after that, not even Martin. I don't turn on music and neither does Holly. It doesn't seem appropriate. As we merge onto the highway, I start to notice something strange. There are a few cars heading North but not a single one heading South. Martin observes this, too, and finally breaks the tense silence.
“Turn around,” he commands, leaning forward and putting his hands on the edges of Holly's seat.
“Why?” she asks just seconds before a minivan swerves and smashes into the center median. Holly jerks the wheel and pushes the brake down at the same time. We manage to avoid the other vehicle but run straight into a cluster of people that scatter in front of the moving car like bowling pins. Everyone in the car screams and there's a break in time as we realize that none of the people we've just hit are alive. The realization makes things both better and worse. I mean, it's good that we haven't killed anyone, but at the same time, this means that we're now practically surrounded by the undead. As soon as my head stops spinning, I look out the window and try to see if I can catch a glimpse of any of the fire faces or the ooze spitters that Martin talked about. All my life, I've had nightmares about being melted alive. If they come true, I don't think my soul will ever recover. When I don't see any, I feel the slightest hint of relief, like a cool breeze felt through a window – not enough to soothe, just enough to tease. This is, of course, before I see the woman in the black cloak. The necromancer. She's standing just over the crest in the hill ahead of us. Martin sees her, too, and hisses under his breath.
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