He stared down at his feet, tapping his fingers on the pew. "Um," he said, thinking, "I don't know. A few months ago, I think." The two of them looked at each other for a moment then he added, "I like reading the stories."
"You do, huh?"
"Yeah. I like God. He seems nice."
She laughed. "Well, why don't you lead the prayer?"
"What does that mean?" he asked.
"Here," she said. She leaned over and put his hands together, telling him to clasp them. "Now close your eyes."
"Okay," he said, closing them. She did the same.
"Now just say a prayer."
"What do I say?"
"Just say whatever you want to God. You know how you're talking to me right now?"
"Yeah."
"Well just pretend that you're doing the same with God. Just have a conversation with him."
"Okay," he said. After a moment's pause, he added, "Out loud?"
"He can't hear you talking if you don't say it out loud."
He was still and considered his words. After careful deliberation, he started. "Hi God," he said.
Sarah had to stifle a laugh at his innocent frankness.
"I'm David," he continued. "I don't know if you know me, but I read about you and I think you're nice. You seem really powerful and I heard that you can do things for people if they ask for it really nice. So... can you help me and my mom? Can you help us get to Noah's Ark? We would really like it if you could. I mean, if you're not busy."
He opened his eyes and looked at her. "Do you want to say something to God?" he asked.
She was taken off guard and spluttered her first few words. "Uh, I guess I could," she said. She had never spoken with God before or had anything to do with prayer or religion. It was something she always heard about, something that other people did, but never her.
After David was satisfied that she was going to say a prayer, he leaned his head down again and closed his eyes. She followed suit and was silent for a moment, considering her words. She didn't know if she really had anything at all to say to God, so at the very least she was looking for words that would be nice to say in front of her son. But in that moment, she thought that maybe it wouldn't be the worst idea to say a prayer to God, just on the off chance that He really was watching over them. She didn't pretend to know what was going on or why the world was the way it was, but David said that they were still alive, and that was true. Good or bad, there was still some reason for them to be there.
"Um," she started, "thank you, God, for blessing us with the life that we continue to have. I don't know what your plan is, or why you saw fit to put us in this situation, and why you saw fit to take everyone else away from us, but I trust in your judgment and I ask that you have mercy on us and continue to watch over us and make sure that we're safe. I hope it's not asking for too much, but it would mean so much for me and my boy. Thank you."
David opened his eyes and looked at her with a big smile. "That was really good, Mom."
"I'm glad you think so," she said.
The two of them got up and walked back up the aisle.
"Did you like praying?" she asked.
"Yeah, I did," he said. "I know God's going to make sure we get there."
She smiled at him, but it was strained, and when he turned his head away from her, it dissolved completely. She felt guilty that her words weren't completely genuine, like she committed sacrilege in a consecrated place. She was starting to realize what separated the two of them: she often only saw the bad in the world, and he, against all odds, refused to accept that evil could ever triumph over good in the end. She always tried to give him hope for the future and teach him the skills he would need to survive. But he was the one who was teaching her about what it meant to be hopeful and that hope was the single-most important thing there was.
At about seven o'clock, they were coming up to Burnt Chimney and they would soon need to find a place to stay for the night. The road had been clear all day, with only a couple of zombies in the distance and no humans at all, so she wasn't worried about going a little bit farther to find a place. They came up to a bend in the road and heard voices.
"Stay quiet," Sarah said to David. She took him by the hand and they carefully made their way up the road, staying to one side and ready to duck into the woods in case there was any trouble. They reached the trees in the bend ahead and peeked around them.
There was an encampment blocking the entire highway, with ramshackle barricades of corrugated metal fencing off the perimeter. Inside, there were shacks made of the same corrugated metal and other sheet metals, and big camping tents. A group of filthy, roughneck men filled the camp. Some of them sat along the perimeter, like they were lookouts. Others milled about and sat by a fire or did tasks or conversed with each other using very coarse language. All of them were armed, carrying pistols or revolvers at minimum, with some of them, especially the lookouts, toting automatic rifles. Dressed in soiled rags with gaunt, pallid features, they didn't look too different from the zombies, except for the hard edge in their eyes. Most had shaved heads and others had greasy mops for hair, and grubby beards were commonplace among them.
Sarah and David crouched down behind a tree and watched.
Shouting came from the road ahead past the camp. Someone screamed and another laughed. The men in the camp gathered around and stared off at the road.
Then two more men walked into the camp with a bound young man and woman in tow, gags in their mouths, and rope around their wrists, being shoved into the middle of the men.
They fell to their hands and knees, sobbing.
All the men circled around them and laughed.
"Couple a fresh ones I found," one of the men who dragged them in said. "Caught 'em wandering up the road about a mile out."
One of the men in the circle grabbed the woman by the back of her shirt and pulled her up on her knees. He took a long hunting knife out of a sheath on his belt and held it up to her face. Her eyes went wide in terror and she screamed from underneath her gag. The man slipped the knife under the fabric in her mouth and cut it off. He put the knife back in its sheath and yanked her hair back, leaning into her and smelling her neck. The woman squirmed under his hot and stinking breath.
The bound man on the ground protested, his words muffled by the cloth in his mouth. He tried to get up, but one of the roughnecks kicked him back down. A few laughs rippled through the crowd as the man who kicked him made a game out of shoving him to the ground with the ball of his foot every time he tried to rise.
Sarah motioned to David. She leaned into his ear and whispered, "Come on, honey, let's go." She grabbed his hand and led him into the woods around the encampment. They crept through as quietly as possible and stayed low while the men were distracted. They found a big rock halfway past their camp and ducked behind it. She peeked over the rock and watched and told David not to look. She made sure his head was down and she covered his ears so he couldn't hear anything, either.
"You her brother?" one of the men said to the young man on the ground. "Boyfriend?"
More muffled words from under the gag, all of them unintelligible.
"He looks like a sack of shit," another man said.
The man keeping him on the ground turned to all the others. "We got use for a sack of shit?"
A chorus of noes, jeers and hollers filled the air.
"Please don't," the young woman said, looking at the man. Tears streamed out of her eyes and the man behind her reined her into his chest with a hand under her chin and fondled her breasts with his other hand.
The man on the ground tried to lunge out at him, but he was kicked back down. This time the man standing over him followed up with a hard kick across his face. There was a sharp crack and blood poured out of his nose as he fell to the ground, gasping for air. The man ran up to him and kicked him in the gut, then began stomping on him. Several others joined in as his body convulsed, finally going limp.
The woman screamed b
loody murder and choked on her own heaving sobs.
Sarah looked down at David to make sure he still wasn't watching.
When they were done beating on the man's dead body, two men dragged him off into the woods on the opposite side of the road from Sarah and David, and they pulled the woman into one of the tents, most of the men forming a line outside.
One man stood outside the tent and announced to the others: "Not too rough with her, boys. As always, Jericho's going to want a piece of her when we're done. You know the rules."
The men grumbled their agreement and turned back to the tent.
Sarah pulled David away from the rock. A couple of men from the camp started patrolling up the road where she wanted to go, so they went deeper into the woods instead, then they would cut back when they got far enough away from them.
The sun had already started to fade and there was only half an hour of light left at best. David started to ask questions about what happened, but Sarah just told him to be quiet. She kept looking over her shoulder as they went, paranoid that someone was following them.
The shadows in the woods grew long and then the sun went down completely. She was scared. She thought she knew where they were going, but they were lost. After walking through the woods for a while, she tried to cut back to the road, but it wasn't there. She began to panic, but she didn't want to let David know there was a problem. He started to ask questions again about why they weren't inside somewhere when the darkness had arrived, but she told him to be quiet and not say another word. He was scared too, but she couldn't even worry about him at that moment.
A twig snapped near them.
They stopped dead in their tracks and looked around.
Trees surrounded them like prison bars, concealing lurking horrors in the darkness. Another twig snapped and a patch of underbrush rustled. The sounds came from all around them as they spun around in every direction, their hearts beating like jackhammers.
A dark shape shuffled out from behind a tree, letting out a long, raspy moan. Then more figures came out of the darkness from all around them.
"Oh my God," she said.
Dozens of them emerged, surrounding them. They shuffled closer, a sea of glowing white eyes bobbing toward them, like a grouping of sea mines floating toward a boat.
The dead were restless, and they were hungry.
11
Out of the Frying Pan…
Gaunt gray faces leered at them in the woods. From behind trees, shrouded in shadow, they came. How many there were, Sarah couldn't tell, but it may as well have been a thousand; they were trapped with nowhere to go.
David wet himself. She pulled the gun from her waistband, though it would do no good.
The zombies started to pick up speed, and the sounds that they made underfoot became deafening, like a swarm of locusts closing in. Their groans became an angry chatter. Their mouths sprung open, waiting for their prey like great white sharks. Leathery arms thrashed through the air.
Instinct took hold of her, using her body as its reflex. She clamped onto David's arm and broke into a run. They went for the weakest link in the encroaching chain. The zombies adjusted their direction as their clumsy legs reached a full run.
David tried to use his power, but he couldn't concentrate. A flurry of words ran through his head as he rushed through as many prayers to God as he could.
The dead sailed through the jet-black woods, bouncing off of trees before regaining themselves and raging on. Two zombies hobbled toward them from the front and Sarah's legs pumped even harder. She let her frantic motherly instinct flow through her as she squeezed David's arm and stiffened her body like a tree trunk. The zombies dove at her and she smashed through them like an offensive tackle. She felt their disgusting bodies roll past her, but in the fury of it all, she couldn't tell if she had been injured or bitten; she just kept running. David hung off her arm, a helpless minnow being pulled by a strong current.
They darted through the woods, weaving their way through the twisting trees. In the darkness, it was hard to tell what was a branch swaying in the wind or a reaching arm. The thunderous cloud of zombies nipped at their heels behind, but she didn't dare look, afraid that if she took her eyes off the path in front of them for one second, they would crash into a tree and be knocked unconscious. The ground underneath undulated and they hiked up their feet as they ran so they didn't catch them on a jutting rock or exposed tree root. As her foot lifted up and came down on the ground, the ground disappeared.
Their hearts floated in the middle of their chests as they sailed through open air and hit the ground hard, tumbling down a steep decline. Rocks and hard patches of ground struck them as they fell. Their bodies crumpled up when they hit the bottom and the Glock that Sarah was holding flew out of her grip. She rolled around on the ground, gasping for air. They had reached the edge of the woods and came to rest on a strip of grass at the side of a road.
David was lying on the ground facedown and he wasn't moving.
She scrambled onto her knees, her head spinning. She patted his head and rubbed the back of his neck.
"David?"
He moved and rolled over onto his back. Tears wet his face as he sat up and cradled his left elbow.
They were both disoriented, but she knew they had to move; the waves of dead above had reached the edge of the woods and flew out of it like missiles. They hit the ground and slid down the hill like penguins.
"Come on!" she said and brought him up to his feet. He let out a cry of pain, but she ignored it. She looked around the side of the road to find the gun that she'd dropped and spotted it sitting on the shoulder of the asphalt. She scooped it up and they ran across the road as the undead rose to their feet at the bottom of the hill.
There was an elementary school a hundred yards down the road and it was the only shelter in sight, surrounded by the same hostile woods. A flagpole stood steadfast at the edge of it, the metal rings of the flag clanging away in the night. There was a parking lot in front of the school with half a dozen abandoned cars, but there were no zombies around it. The windows of the school were boarded up and it looked like it had been abandoned long ago.
They got a good head start on the ravenous corpses pursuing them and fled across the parking lot before the dead stepped on school grounds. David started to slow down, and it was clear that he was starting to go into shock again, just like the last time they had run into a horde of zombies.
They reached the front doors of the school to find them boarded up. Panes of glass that sat in the metal frames had been smashed and replaced with sheets of particleboard from the inside.
The horde was in the parking lot now, their determination unceasing. There were too many of them to fight and they couldn't be outrun forever. It was in the school or death.
In her desperation, Sarah kicked at the wood through the broken window in the bottom of the door. Her foot bounced off it and the board moved an inch, but snapped right back. She kicked it again and had the same result.
David's back was against the wall as he stared at the approaching zombies. He sat there like a statue, his big, unblinking eyes shining in the moonlight. He almost looked comatose.
Faces of madness moved through the darkness and past the cars, their jaws flapping. Wheezy moans broke the tranquility of the night.
Sarah kicked the wood again and heard metal prying against metal. The bottom-corner of the particleboard had come loose from the door, nails sticking through it and hanging in the air.
The riotous chorus of feet slapping against pavement swept onto the lawn just before the school's entrance. The dead reached their arms out, salivating and ready to chew the two of them into small pieces.
Her foot shot through the bottom window in the door with a crack and a chunk of wood bounced around inside the echoing walls of the school, leaving a hole in the board that was big enough to crawl through. She scrambled over to David and pulled him toward the opening. His limbs moved in cooperation with her, but his
mind was absent, wiped clean by abject terror. She shoved him through the door and crawled in after him.
A zombie dove for her and landed on her legs. The sudden crushing weight jolted through her whole body in a wave. It held onto her with cold and grisly hands, bringing its open mouth toward her thigh. She panicked and flopped like a fish out of water, then twisted around and kicked at it. Her legs shooting back and forth like pistons pried the zombie up, and one of her feet found the square of its collar, shoving it back before her other foot collided with its face. Its teeth scraped against the rubber on the bottom of her shoe before being knocked into its mouth like a handful of Chiclets. The zombie rolled off and she grabbed onto each side of the doorframe and pulled herself into the school.
The interior was pitch-black and she couldn't see a thing. Any light that would have scattered through the windows was shut out by the boards nailed to them.
The whole crowd of the undead crashed into the door outside and sent an ear-splitting shockwave through the empty school. There was nothing to stop them from crawling through and it was too dangerous to wander into the darkness, leaving the two of them nowhere to hide.
Sarah ripped off her backpack and fished inside for the mini flashlight she pilfered from the house. Her fingers found the curve of the small tube and she pulled it out and turned it on.
A zombie appeared through the opening in the door. It looked up at her as she shone the flashlight at it, every sickening detail of its gruesome face revealed in the light. Its mouth stretched down and its discolored tongue waggled in anticipation. Its decomposed fingers were pressed down on the floor like talons as it pulled itself in. Its torso slid over the bottom of the door, raking its belly over small shards of glass standing up and peeling its skin off.
Sarah swept the light around the entrance and saw a ransacked vending machine standing next to the door. She took a wide stance in front of it, the zombie's head following her as she moved, and she pulled on it with all her might. It moved so slowly that she didn't think she was doing anything at all, but it shifted onto two legs and tilted. When it teetered on the brink of standing or falling, she gave it a shove and the heavy mass of metal tipped over.
The Fall of Man (Zombie Apocalypse Series Book 1) Page 10
