by TW Brown
They ate in silence and when he was finished, Kevin climbed inside his sleeping bag and drifted off to sleep. The dreams came in a torrent. Every face seemed to be screaming silently in pain.
Cary.
Mike.
Darrin.
His only friends in the world and the group he had left Virginia Beach with on a mission to survive the zombie apocalypse. Those faces gave way to Ruth and Angela Bergman. Shaw and his band of lunatics. The deranged teacher, Mr. Abernathy.
His sister.
Valarie.
His sister.
Valarie.
***
“Wake up,” a sweet voice whispered in his ear.
“Aleah?” Kevin rolled over and pulled the blurry figure close, his mouth seeking hers.
“Open your eyes, Romeo,” Willa snapped, shoving him back.
Kevin jolted awake. A wave of embarrassment made his face burn and his hands tingle. He tried to apologize, but not one word out of his mouth was understandable.
“Just relax,” Willa chuckled. “You didn’t do nothing wrong. But I need your ass awake right now.”
“What is it?” Kevin wanted to climb out of his sleeping bag, but certain…physiological responses made that an embarrassing proposition at the present time.
“Lots of noise outside.”
“Like zombie herd noise?”
“Like living people on the run and more living people chasing them.”
Kevin wiped the sleep from his eyes and the slight trace of drool from his chin as he struggled to fully awaken. His body ached all over, and it took him a while to realize why. He hadn’t just been out for a walk…he’d been slogging through almost knee-deep snow all day the previous day.
As he went through the ritual of packing up his gear, Willa kept pacing. As he picked up his pack, she almost seemed to be ready to run for the door. He hadn’t ever seen her this rattled. Of course, he had to admit that he didn’t know the woman all that well to begin with.
“Something bad was happening out there. I heard crying…definitely crying,” Willa insisted.
“Okay,” Kevin nodded, “but what is all this about?” He made a gesture with his hands that encompassed Willa.
“I don’t know what all you’ve seen out in the world since this happened…but there are some pretty bad people out there now that nobody is making folks behave.”
“I’ve seen my share of bad.”
“Yeah…but things have been happening to women that I don’t think you can really appreciate. You asked why that outfit I was with just had women? It’s because over half of us have been victimized in one way or another by men…often groups of men.”
Kevin felt a slight twist in his gut. He’d saved one young lady from an unimaginable situation and killed her captor in a rather violent fashion. He still had nightmares about it. However, it was in this moment that a wave of guilt washed over him. His guilt had not been for what Heather, the young woman he rescued, had endured. Rather, it was for his taking of a human life.
“Well I won’t let anything happen to you as long as I am still breathing,” Kevin vowed. It was as much to himself as it was to the normally strong woman who now stood before him seeming more like a frightened child.
Willa appeared to consider Kevin for a moment with a different eye than he was accustomed. A sad look clouded her expression and she shook her head. “That’s sweet, Kevin, but you’re just one person. There is a whole world out there…and a lot of really bad people are out there in it.”
“But you can’t believe that,” Kevin insisted.
“I can…and I do.”
“Then what are we fighting to stay alive for?”
“It’s in our nature…most of us anyways. Lots of folks took the easy way out a long time ago.”
“So you’re telling me that all that’s left out there in the world are monsters…rapists…”
“Not all,” Willa said with a sad smile. “There are a few men like you out there. However…most of the good guys died early on trying to save everybody around them. The cowards hid and waited for a world that they could poke their heads out into and finally crawl out from under their rocks.”
“I refuse to believe that.”
“You aren’t a woman…a girl…or a child.”
Kevin considered that statement and then held a hand out to Willa. She took it and they headed out the back door of the house and listened to the stillness that was only interrupted by the occasional sounds of branches bending under the weight of the snow.
“Well whoever came through seems to have taken no notice of our tracks or these houses,” Kevin whispered. “Let’s get moving.”
Together, they trudged out into the snow. By midday, they had discovered a series of tracks that wove in and out of the trees. They also discovered that their bodies could not endure much more. Between the exposure to the cold and the strain placed on the body involved in walking through the knee deep powder, the pair were exhausted beyond the ability to continue. For Kevin, this would simply not do; Valarie was waiting. She needed him to keep moving.
“We need to find a residential area,” Kevin announced as he handed his canteen to Willa.
“You want to make camp this early?”
“No. We need to find snowshoes, skis…anything. Otherwise we are not going to make it.”
Kevin sought out the highest ground he could find and searched. The biggest problem was one that he had noticed during the journey to Newark from the golf course compound where his friends waited. Before the world had been plunged into darkness, most buildings gave off heat. That caused the snow to melt. Now…buildings were harder to see in this glaring white landscape. They were buried under snow just like everything else.
It took him a while, but eventually he found what he was looking for and led the way. The monotone colors of the landscape played tricks with distance and it ended up being much farther than it initially looked. To add to the frustration, it was well to the south of them, taking him away from his ultimate destination.
On the positive side of things, the zombie presence was nil. There were no signs that anything—living or otherwise—had passed through the area. About an hour into the trek across the open countryside, the sun made an eventual appearance. That was a mixed blessing in that it actually felt warmer. The downside was the glare. Kevin’s eyes began to blur and water. Early on, Willa stopped him and wrapped his scarf around his face and pulled his cap down low.
“You will get the worst sunburn of your life on any exposed skin,” she answered his questioning look.
He didn’t see how he could possibly be much more uncomfortable. His skin was already raw and chapped in so many places. Small sections were beginning to bleed and scab over. His hands and feet felt like blocks of ice grafted on to the end of his limbs. In short, he was miserable.
They finally reached the entrance to a housing development. A decorative brick façade announced it as: Picnic Palisades. Did everything in this area have ties to that damned basket-shaped building? he wondered acerbically.
The development looked to be set up in a razor-straight grid. All of the houses had postage stamp-sized front yards. The place had not fared well and Kevin was immediately reminded of the neighborhood that the Sarah Polley character lived in at the start of that Dawn of the Dead remake.
Several of the houses had suffered from a fire that had been allowed to burn out of control. The wind must’ve been blowing to the east that day, he figured as he surveyed the scene. Between the chaos that had obviously reigned in those first days and the subsequent looting, this once upper-scale residential area now more closely resembled an inner-city slum or a war zone.
From some of the homes up the street, Kevin spotted dark figures moving. This was going to be tricky.
“Should we split up to speed up the search?” Willa whispered.
“I don’t think that is a good idea.”
“It’s not like we both haven’t been fighting a
nd surviving since day one. I realize the advantage of sticking together, but we aren’t going to be so far apart that we couldn’t rush to the other’s aid. Plus, I think you should leave your bag of meds in the street or something…just in case.”
Kevin had to admit that she made excellent points. Still, years of horror movies screamed in his brain that this was a terrible idea and it never ended well when people split up. However…
“This ain’t the movies,” Kevin grunted as he unslung his pack and set it up beside the nearby bank of mailboxes.
“Huh?”
“Nothing.” Kevin selected his trusty machete and his Ka-Bar from his weapons. He wanted to be as light and mobile as possible.
“So how do you want to do this?” Willa set her gear beside Kevin’s. She seemed to fidget over her weapon choice for a few seconds before settling on a garden variety machete and her crossbow.
“I say we leapfrog down one side of the street until we reach the end and then return. Don’t enter your next house until I’ve come out of mine.”
“Sounds good.”
They walked up almost three blocks to clear the heavily burned section. Along the way, a few zombies crawled out from the charred ruins, but were easily dispatched. Finally, they reached the first houses that looked safe enough to enter. The first one only had minimal fire damage on one side of the structure. The pair patted each other on the shoulder and Kevin headed for the second house.
He tried the door and was happy to discover it unlocked. Entering the small foyer, he was greeted by a grand staircase on either side that allowed access to the second floor. He really didn’t think the upstairs bedrooms would hold what he sought.
The house didn’t smell, and other than a layer of dust, seemed in excellent condition. He was mildly surprised that looters hadn’t sacked it, but he imagined that, like any other resource in the post-apocalyptic world, even looters had to be in short supply. With so few people living, they couldn’t hit everything.
This actually gave him some hope. There were still places where they could seek supplies once he returned to the others. He knew from the exterior of the house that the garage would be to his right, and so he moved cautiously down the hall and turned right into a kitchen that was almost the size of his apartment. An oak door was on the other side of the enormous refrigerator.
He opened the door to a pitch black three car garage. The slight illumination came from the open doorway he now stood in. A quick sniff didn’t raise any alarms, but he would not drop his guard.
For some reason, he really struggled with taking that first step into the darkness. Hugging one wall, he inched his way in and eventually reached the sturdy roll-up door. It took a considerable amount of fumbling around before he was able to find the mechanism and then figure it out enough so that he could manually open the garage.
The door inched upwards on squeaky rails and Kevin winced as he realized that any zombie for blocks…maybe even miles…had probably just heard his actions. Realizing he had nothing to gain in opening the door slowly, he heaved it up.
Sure enough, coming up the driveway were several undead. Quickly surveying the situation, he decided that his best move was to step in between the fancy sports car and the never-been-in-the-mud four-wheel-drive truck that would require a step stool to climb inside. This offered him a perfect view of the approaching threats as well as funneling the zombies to him in a very defendable space. It worked even better than expected. In a matter of a few moments, the snowy driveway was strewn with bodies, and as an added bonus, he had multiple pathways to walk in. He could trace each zombie back to its point of origin if he so desired.
A look around the garage proved to be a disappointment as far as transportation was concerned. He had returned back inside and been tickled to discover a set of hooks with key rings dangling from them, However, none of the cars rewarded him by turning over when he tried the ignition.
He went out to the sidewalk and waited for Willa. She’d had no better luck than he, so they moved on. House by house they searched. They encountered every possibility inside from mass suicide to an undead family waiting on them like they would a pizza delivery. Many of the homes were looted, some showed signs of having hosted squatters who eventually figured out the obvious—a residential neighborhood was no place to ride out the zombie uprising. The only real benefit thus far proved to be an occasional pantry with canned food on the shelves.
As the shadows grew long and the pair grew weary, Kevin began searching for a spot to stay the night. He found it in the back yard of one of the houses that had yielded nothing beyond a zombified family that consisted of father, mother, teenaged son, pre-teen daughter and a Golden Retriever. The irony came when he searched the garage. He hadn’t really expected to find anything outdoorsy considering the obesity level of the entire family—dog included. Still, he couldn’t stifle his chuckle after he opened the main garage door to shed some light. On the back window of a huge blue Suburban was a variation of the stick figure window decals. A zombie family paraded across the tinted glass under the words: “My zombie family ate your stick figure family!” In that family’s above average-sized back yard was a large oak tree with a deluxe tree house.
He signaled Willa to join him in the garage when she exited the house she’d just finished searching. She was not nearly as amused by the window decal, but she was more than happy to climb up into the tree house for the night after they retrieved their packs,
Kevin tried to hide his excitement behind the discovery of a bookshelf in the tree house that would make any zombie nut jealous. There were several titles he was familiar with: World War Z, Monster Island, and every single Walking Dead comic book and compendium. However, there was also a plethora of titles he had never heard of by names he was unfamiliar with like Mark Tufo, Armand Rosamilia and John O’Brien.
“You’ve got to be kidding,” Willa sighed as she flopped down on the cot shoved against one wall.
“Hey…it was a lot more popular than most folks realize,” Kevin replied, warring against his inner desire to grab a book from the shelf.
“Yeah…well no need to read that crap anymore. Just go outside.”
Kevin considered a few of the titles, but decided that Willa was right. He realized that he no more wanted to read any of those books any more than one of those soccer players in that plane crash probably wanted to read about the Donner Party.
They settled in and began opening up an assortment of cans. Despite being cold, his body was starved and the food sent tingles of contentment through him. Once they were both full, they opened up their sleeping bags, crawled inside, and drifted off to sleep.
***
Kevin woke first to the hair-raising sound of a baby cry. He rolled over to shake Willa and discovered that she was gone; her sleeping bag nothing more than an empty shell. Sitting bolt upright, he almost broke his legs trying to get out of his sleeping bag. The room was still dark—the inky blackness of a dead world combined with a thick cloud cover—making it impossible for him to even see his own hand in front of his face.
Feeling around, he tried to recall the layout of the small cubicle. The back of his hand struck the bookcase and he was unable to stifle a yelp of pain. That only encouraged the crying zombie somewhere down below.
A thought entered Kevin’s mind, and he quickly forced it back into a dark corner. By the time he managed to discover the floor hatch that they had climbed through the night before, Kevin could not stop his hands from shaking. He tried to convince himself that it was the cold, but he knew better. He tugged the hatch up and actually managed to make out a handful of shadows moving around at the base of the tree.
“Willa?” he hissed in futility. He knew damn well that no answer would be forthcoming. Still, until the dawn broke and he could see for himself, he was not prepared to accept the reality of the woman’s fate.
Over the next two hours, he had plenty of time to consider just what in the hell had happened. He could not ferret o
ut any situation where she would simply leave in the middle of the night. The only fly in the ointment of his defense that there had to be a reasonable and rational explanation for her absence continued to be blown up by the growls and cries coming from the base of the tree.
Finally, a dull glow shown from the open square in the floor and the curtained windows, signaling that morning had indeed broken. Steeling himself for the sight he was certain waited for him down below, Kevin crawled to the square and peered down.
It was still too dark to make out anything beyond individual shapes. He flopped back and looked around the tree house. He had hoped that perhaps she might’ve left him a note…anything. He didn’t like the idea of staying up in this place any longer and wanted to get moving. He turned his head and considered his former companion’s pack. If nothing else, he would take the crossbow. Rummaging through, he was disappointed to discover that it was not there amongst the scant few belongings left behind.
A peculiar thump sounded down below. Followed by another…and then another. Kevin drew his Ka-Bar and moved to the hatch. He was unprepared for what greeted him. Three of the zombies—dawn had given way enough for him to actually begin to make out details—were pinned to the trunk of the huge oak. A hiss and a thump were accompanied by a dark flash as another of the zombies took a bolt to the head.
Kevin leaned down farther and looked in the direction of the house. Standing in the yard on a pair of long, slender skis, Willa was bringing her crossbow back up to her shoulder. A second later, the noises repeated and another zombie was finished. This one had the bolt pass all the way through its head, and it fell to the snow.
“What in blazes!” Kevin hissed. “You scared me to death. I thought…well…never mind what I thought, but what could you have possibly been thinking?”
“I had to use the bathroom,” Willa talk-whispered back.
