Divided We Rot (One Nation Under Zombies Book 3)

by Raymond Lee

“So what, are we just going to leave them here?” Damian asked.

  Hal shook his head, thinking. He’d been with Janjai almost from the beginning. She was a good person who’d already been through a lot before the outbreak even started. He couldn’t abandon her in a place where her every action would be controlled, not after she’d suffered through a similar marriage.

  Two men approached, coming from David’s house. Hal turned and started walking in the opposite direction, toward the medical center, before they could get suspicious of their small group. Damian and Elijah followed along without having to be told.

  “They say we are free to leave if we choose,” Hal said. “Maybe we should try that and then we can come back armed and with help.”

  “What do you mean?” Damian asked.

  “I mean we ask to leave and see if they allow it. If they do we go find Raven and Cruz, do what needs doing there and we come back with them. Elijah will be our guy on the inside while we’re away.”

  “I have to stay here alone?” Fear laced Elijah’s voice.

  “You won’t be alone.” Hal assured him. “You’ll have Pimjai and Janjai. We won’t be gone long either. Raven is probably still fighting through the virus. Once it runs its course she should be ready to fight and we’ll be right back.”

  “How do you know they’ll let you back in?”

  “That’s why you’ll still be here,” Hal explained. “If they don’t let us in you’re going to be our way in.”

  “I think you have way too much faith in me,” Elijah said, staring down at his feet as they continued walking. “Maybe Damian should be the one to stay.”

  “Every minute Damian stays here is another minute closer to them finding out about him and locking him up with Leah.” Hal stopped abruptly, causing Elijah to run into his back. “That’s it!”

  “What’s it?” Elijah asked, rubbing his nose.

  “Yeah, what’s it?” Damian asked, eyes wary. “Because I know damn well you aren’t saying what I think you’re saying.”

  “But, Damian, what better way to find where they’re keeping her than to be taken there yourself?”

  “You gotta use the bathroom?”

  Sky looked over at the man next to her for a moment before returning her gaze to the clusters of trees and building tops lining the edge of the highway. “I’m fine.”

  “Kid, you shake your leg any harder you’re going to blow out our shocks.” He chuckled to himself. “I’ll pull over at the next off ramp, all right? Find you some trees or something for cover. Is that OK?”

  Sky nodded but said nothing, afraid if she allowed herself to speak she wouldn’t be able to hold back the tears. She missed Torres. She missed riding with him. She even missed how irritated he would get with her because she didn’t want to pee on the road. She wished she hadn’t given him so much trouble. Mostly, she wished she’d never left him.

  She’d survived the virus. She’d left him for nothing, just to get snatched by two of the most horrible people she’d ever met. Sadie had something wrong in her head, that had been clear from the start, but Eric… Eric was a real piece of work. He bullied Sadie into doing whatever he wanted and she allowed it. He bullied her too, threatened her. But they weren’t just threats. Sky looked at her reflection in the side view mirror and ground her teeth together. She’d longed for the day Eric got what was coming to him, but still she didn’t feel the joy she’d thought she would feel. She looked over at Scott Richards and realized it was because she’d dreamed of Torres finding her. Torres was supposed to come to her rescue, not the loser her sister used to date. Weird, she thought.

  “Were you telling the truth before?”

  Richards looked over at her and raised his eyebrows.

  “About my sister? You said she comes to you in your dreams.”

  He nodded and returned his attention to the road as he slowed down and carefully weaved between abandoned cars. “It started toward the beginning of the outbreak, maybe a week or two after?”

  About the time she and Raven separated, Sky thought, frowning.

  “I’ve lost count how many of the dreams I’ve had but they’re all pretty much the same. She’s just there, reaching out to me, telling me to hurry. I thought she wanted me to find her.” He laughed. “Crazy, huh? I felt it though, like she was lost somewhere and needed me to come save her. Sometimes she even said it. She got more urgent with time and she started coming to me more and more. Sometimes she reached for me, but she started pointing a lot too, like she was guiding me. I even saw her while awake a few times. I dreamed of her this morning and I heard her voice like she was right there beside me when I saw you coming out of that store. It became very clear that she led me to you, and that she wanted me to save you.”

  A cold chill skated along Sky’s spine as her skin pebbled with goosebumps. “Like a ghost?”

  Richards frowned. He cast her a quick glance before focusing on navigating. They’d cleared the last clump of abandoned vehicles but there were infected people shuffling down the highway. “I don’t know. I’ve been following her, moving in the direction she pointed and it led me to you, but she didn’t start out that way. At first she seemed to be beckoning me to find her. Sometimes she said ‘us’ too. I don’t think she’d do that if she were dead.”

  “But how could she do it if she was alive?” Sky folded her arms tighter and squeezed her knees together, focusing on her need to urinate to take her mind off the realization currently causing tears to form in her eyes. She’d come to terms with Raven’s death a long time ago, or so she thought, figuring her sister would have never left her alone unless she had no choice. Torres had stayed in Hollywood longer than he wanted because of her, giving her sister a chance to find them. Sky decided a long time ago that Raven was dead, so why did the pain of knowing that seem so fresh now?

  “I don’t have an answer for that, kid. I guess we’ll find out if she comes to me again.”

  “You think she’ll come to you again?”

  Richards shrugged. “I mean… if she’s still alive she probably needs help so it would make sense. She led me to you so I could help you. She’d want to be reunited with you.”

  “She hated you,” Sky blurted out, fueled by a hot anger that came out of nowhere. “She told me she hoped you’d die and birds would peck your scrotum apart!”

  Richards’s eyes grew wide as his face twisted into a horrified expression. “She really said that?” he asked, looking at her.

  “Yup.” Sky clenched her hands tight and slunk down in her seat as far as the seatbelt would allow. “She hated you so why would she come to you? Of all the people she could have come to why did she come to you?”

  “Instead of you?” Richards’s voice was soft, his eyes understanding as he reached over and rested his hand on her head. Sky jerked her head away from his touch and he replaced his hand on the steering wheel. “I don’t know why she didn’t come to you. Maybe she couldn’t. I don’t know why she came to me. I mean, I knew she was mad at me. I didn’t know she was that mad at me that she wanted my freaking scrotum shredded by birds. That’s pretty harsh.” He chuckled. “But it sounds like her. She was fire and ice, and fierce as hell. She loved you more than anything so I’m pretty sure her coming to me didn’t have anything to do with her feelings. Scratch that, I know it didn’t have anything to do with her feelings because if it did she would have been in your dreams every night. She’d never let you go, Sky. Never.”

  “But she did.”

  “Then she had to.” He swerved around a lone zombie and directed them toward an off ramp ahead.

  They exited the highway and Richards crept along the streets, scanning for threats. He drove them around a park a few times before stopping in the middle of the street between the park and a row of houses. “We have a few options here,” he said as he leaned over the steering wheel and nodded toward the park. “That park is a pretty wide open space but it has trees and bushes for coverage so you have privacy. There are houses and t
hat looks like a laundromat and bank up the street there. These places would have actual bathrooms if you’d prefer that. I mean, you probably won’t be able to flush but that doesn’t matter since we’re not planning on staying. I’d have to do a sweep of any building we choose first though.” He looked down at her shaking leg. “At this point I’m not sure you want to wait that long.”

  “I don’t think I can wait that long,” she said from behind clenched teeth. The promise of a nearby place to pee seemed to have revved up her need to. Sky squeezed the door handle with one hand and used the other to point to the park. “I’ll take the park. I’ll go in that clump of bushes. You can see me good enough from here.”

  “I don’t think so, kid. I’m not a perv and I’m not going to be checking you out but I’m also not staying all the way over here in the SUV while you’re out there dangling like a bacon strip to these things.”

  “What things?” she asked, spreading her hands wide, palms up, to indicate the lack of zombies in the area as he drove them closer to the area she’d pointed out and parked along the curb.

  “The things that like to run out and get you when you least expect it,” he said, cutting the engine. “Like the zombies that run now and the assholes who are using this whole screwed up situation to kidnap little girls and kill people for kicks.”

  “Oh. Those things.”

  “Yeah, those things.”

  Sky rolled her eyes as she unfastened her seatbelt and opened the glove compartment to get the roll of toilet paper kept there. “Fine, but keep your distance.”

  “No worries, kid. I’m not a dirty weirdo and even if I was I wouldn’t go near the little sister of the woman who wants my junk shredded by birds.”

  “What is a scrotum anyway?”

  His face blanched. “Uh, you can ask your sister that when we find her.”

  “What if she’s dead?”

  “If she’s dead and you still want to know what a scrotum is when you die seventy or so years from now you can find her then and ask.”

  “Wuss,” she muttered as she exited the SUV and heard Richards laughing softly as he exited on his side.

  They walked along a pathway to avoid trudging through the overgrown grass, passing a dilapidated swing set and slide. Richards walked with a knife in hand and his gun holstered at his hip, head on a swivel as he looked for trouble. They passed a cluster of trees and saw a small building.

  “Hold up,” Richards said, stopping to point at the building. “That looks like a bathroom. That might be better than those bushes. This grass is so high anything could be in it and you wouldn’t know until it had its teeth in your ass.”

  “Ugh.” Sky cringed. “That’s gross.”

  He cut her a look before changing course to lead her to the bathroom. “It’s probably going to reek in here since park bathrooms usually smell like piss and trash even when they’re being maintained, but there could be snakes or anything in those bushes. As long as nothing’s inside it’s definitely got to be safer and I can stand outside so you have your privacy.”

  “You had me at snakes,” she told him, thinking back to the last time she’d used a public bathroom while with Torres. “Be real careful going in there. I’ve seen infected people in bathrooms. You’d think they’d be out looking for people to eat, but they get stuck in weird places. I don’t think they can open doors.”

  “Yeah, I know. It’s kind of insulting that these freaks are managing to kill so many people when they can’t even do the simplest shit. They couldn’t even run at first. Some of them still can’t.”

  “Why are some running now?”

  “I don’t know.” He shook his head. “It all happened after the worst of winter. I was hoping they’d just freeze to death, well, their final death, but I think they thawed out and started running. The really new looking ones don’t run so I’m thinking it has something to do with the cold’s effect on their bodies.”

  “That makes no sense.”

  “Kid, none of this shit makes sense.”

  They reached the bathroom and the smell from the vents warned them of the disgust to come. Richards held his index finger in front of his mouth, gesturing for Sky to be quiet as he looked around them. He placed his knife back in the sheath attached to one of his belt loops and walked over to a fallen branch peeking out of the tall grass along the edge of the walkway they’d used to reach the bathroom. He tested its weight, went through a few practice swings, and walked back over to the bathroom door marked with the sign for women. He stood to the side, raised the branch like a baseball bat and nodded to Sky. “Open it and stand back behind the door out of the way.”

  Sky froze for a moment as she looked at Richards with the branch over his shoulder, remembering Torres and the baseball bat he used so often. She shook her head to lose the image before she could give in to the urge to cry, missing Torres more than ever and feeling like a traitor now that she was traveling with another man and he was all by himself, if he was even alive.

  “Kid?”

  “I got it.” She gripped the handle and pulled the door open, hiding behind it like Richards had told her although she didn’t think anything would come running or shambling out, not with her there, not after what had happened with Eric’s brother.

  They waited a moment and after nothing ran out immediately Richards tapped the door frame with the branch and called, “Anything in there?”

  “Stay here,” he said after he didn’t get a reaction and ducked inside.

  Sky looked around, scanning the park as she heard Richards opening stall doors, checking for hidden dangers. She heard something shuffling along the other side of the building and walked to the corner to take a look, knowing what it was before she saw it. Her stomach grumbled with intense hunger and the smell of the thing assaulted her, its stench worse than what came from the abandoned bathroom. She peeked around the corner and saw it, a male zombie that looked to be in its late teens to early twenties, pretty new judging by the low degree of rot. It froze in place, staring at her.

  “Leave us,” she said, her voice low but full of authority. “Go. Away.”

  The zombie turned and started to shamble off in the direction it had come from.

  “Hey!”

  She jerked and turned to see Richards standing outside the bathroom, hand on hip and eyes full of anger. “You were supposed to be standing here holding this damn door open!”

  “The door stayed open on its own.”

  “Not the point.”

  She rolled her eyes. “I thought I heard something.”

  Richards stepped closer, raising the branch like a baseball bat again. He peered around the corner and saw the zombie shambling away.

  “Shit,” he whispered. “Don’t make any noise and maybe it won’t know we’re here. Where the hell did it come from? It seems like it would have heard us and came this way. It had to be behind the building.”

  “None of this makes sense, remember? Can I go pee now?” She bobbed up and down for emphasis, reminding him how bad she had to go.

  “Yeah, I stomped on a pretty big cockroach but other than that it’s pretty clean. Well, clean isn’t the right word, but it’s clear. Don’t go near the last stall on the left. I’ll never be able to unsee what I saw in that toilet.” He shuddered and made a gagging face. “Be quick in case that thing decides to come back or even worse, brings some buddies with him.”

  Sky left him and entered the bathroom, holding her free hand over her nose as she crossed to the first stall and stepped inside. The bathroom was disgusting as expected, but there were no dead bodies and no blood which was a step up from some she’d seen before. She grabbed a paper toilet seat cover and used it to create a barrier between the filthy seat and her body.

  She looked at the scar along her hip as she did her business, the only physical evidence left of her attack. The other evidence was all inside, the way she could feel the hunger when the zombies were near, the pain she felt when they were killed. The way she cou
ld speak to them and they did what she said. She’d only done it once before when Eric’s brother had forced her to. She’d killed him, even if she didn’t do the killing with her own hands. She’d killed him with her mind and she wasn’t the least bit sorry.

  She finished using the bathroom and walked to the sinks. She tore off a piece of toilet paper from her roll and used it to wipe a circle clean enough to see her reflection. It came back blurry but she was able to see where she’d lost weight from barely being able to eat through the winter and even through the blur she could see the grime she’d already seen in the side view mirror in the SUV. Tears spilled over, sliding down her cheeks. She wiped them away with her dirty coat sleeve, smearing the grime, and took a deep breath. Despite the time her sister spent with him, Sky didn’t actually know Scott Richards well, but her sister had definitely loathed him for a reason. He might have rescued her from Eric and Sadie, but she couldn’t trust him enough to show weakness. If she’d learned anything from her time with Eric and Sadie it was that bad people preyed on weakness.

  Her stomach cramped hard enough to double her over. She gripped the sink and gritted her teeth as the hunger twisted inside her. Her mouth salivated as the craving for flesh threatened to overtake her. She’d been through it enough to know it wasn’t coming from her but the enemies around her. To be so strong there had to be multiple and they had to be nearby. She ran out of the bathroom, ramming right into Richards’s chest, nearly knocking him backward.

  “Shit!” He righted himself and gripped her shoulder with his free hand. “I was coming to check on you. What’s wrong?”

  She turned her head, scanning the park but saw nothing so she walked to the edge of the bathroom and looked around. There they were, half a dozen zombies spilling out from between two buildings to cross the street, headed in their direction. As they reached the other side more zombies spilled out.

  “Time to go,” Richards said, having followed her. He grabbed her arm and pulled her away before pushing her in the direction of the SUV. “Run!”