by Joshua Guess
The sounds of swishing branches and scraping shoes vanished in a space of a minute, even the distant odd noise I’d been listening for no longer apparent. What I could see of the sky between the thick boughs of pine needles was pale blue giving way to streaks of brilliant red and orange, but the forest floor was inky black interspersed with dark grays.
Horror movies contain valuable lessons. The most relevant being that when you’re being chased through the woods, there is always a moment when you think you’re finally safe and leave your hiding spot. That’s when the dude wearing inappropriate sports equipment pops out and cuts your head off. No thanks.
First rule of survival when you’re lost is to sit still and wait for rescue. The same works when you’re trying to stay hidden and people have moved on from the spot they’ve been searching.
So I settled in and waited, fear keeping me awake even if boredom fought with it for control.
I moved out a few hours later. That was a guess, me being without a watch, but full night set in and I kept an eye on the position of the moon to give me a vague idea of how long I’d been sitting there.
Louis County wasn’t small, but neither was it huge. In the years I had lived there, not many corners went unexplored. I knew the basic topography and layout of the roads crisscrossing it, so once I found a road and identified it, I would have some idea where I was and how I could get home.
I ran the risk of being spotted if my captors were out looking for me, the roads being the obvious choice. They probably weren’t the only survivors out there, either, and let’s not forget about zombies. I wasn’t lacking for choices when it came to potentially fatal obstacles out here in the wild.
And it was the wild, no matter how tame this land had been before the cataclysm two days prior. Being experienced with the weird dissonance when expected reality gives way to a nightmare helped me cope a little, but I still had to remind myself that every foot of ground was now, for all intents and purposes, a war zone. Surviving meant treating every step forward as a move through hostile territory.
It took another hour or so to find the nearest road. I stuck to wooded areas and took my sweet time, stopping every few dozen steps to listen for sounds of pursuit by the living and dead alike. When the irregular ground gave way to a wide swath of even blacktop, I cried a little. Then I stepped back into the grass and followed the road without actually being on it. I figured it would be easier to throw myself to the ground and pretend to be a log if I didn’t have to scramble off the road to do it.
I didn’t recognize anything at first. There weren’t many curves or features to separate the road from any generic stretch of asphalt in the county. I trudged along at a slow, steady pace while I fought down a rising weariness. I’d been awake a long time.
Seventeen years later I came to an intersection. I had to get right next to the signs to read them—the moonlight was shit for reading—and saw the names Poplar and Branch at right angles to each other in white-on-green.
I was in the far north of the county, an area thick with farms, a pretty nice Bed and Breakfast, and a small boutique winery. It was as far from my place as I could get and still be in the county.
I breathed a deep sigh of relief. Being lost, even in the larger context of a familiar location, sucks in every way possible. Having a bearing settled me down a little, pushed back on the reservoir of panic barely kept in check from the moment I had been taken. I knew which way to go from here.
I kept to the same routine of following the road without being on it. Despite the exhaustion I fought from being awake for most of a full day, I was lucky to be moving along at night. Zombies seemed to need rest of some kind, or at least recognized night as an overall bad time to hunt efficiently. The closest I came to finding any were some distant moans, which if I’m honest could have just as easily been people having some end-of-the-world sex.
The roads were mostly clear this far from town. The first few miles were pristine, actually, showing no sign of the recent apocalypse. Moving further toward Wallace brought fresh proof, however, most often in the form of discarded clothing and other sundries.
Then I found a car.
It was an older model hatchback, dark in color. It sat half on the road, left wheels mired in the rut running alongside it. There were no bodies in evidence, so I took a chance. The thing might not run—I mean, it was just sitting there—but I was tired enough to risk finding out for sure.
I approached with the wary caution of a Neanderthal clutching his spear in the presence of a great mammoth, unsure if it was dead. I circled the adorable little car, lowering myself to the pavement to look beneath it. No zombies waited to snag my ankles, though there was a wide wet patch of asphalt. Something was leaking. I didn’t smell gas.
Working up the courage to look inside took a few seconds. Logically I knew most of the reasons for the car sitting here were awful, but that didn’t prepare me for what I might see. In the heat of a fight or the stress of an immediately dangerous situation, the sight of death didn’t have the impact it would on a quiet night like this where the dangers were somewhat removed.
Hands curled around my eyes, I pressed against the window to see inside. It looked empty, but the world was too dim to be absolutely certain. Instead of opening the door—my first instinct—I caught myself and decided it would be better to wake up anything that might hiding in there with at least a pane of glass between us.
Nothing stirred when I rapped my knuckles against the passenger side. Then I opened the door. Light filled the car and spilled across the ground, revealing a vehicle empty of occupants. Clothes were piled in the back, filling the floorboard and making a fabric tidal wave reaching into the front. The keys were in the ignition.
I threw myself over the passenger seat and came to rest behind the wheel, then leaned over and pulled the door shut. Pushing down excitement and dread, I reached for the keys with trembling fingers. The key turned, the engine coughed, and after a stutter it caught and purred to life.
An array of lights blazed from the dashboard in the darkness, but I ignored them. If the car couldn’t make it across the county, so be it, but I would waste not another minute of my life worrying. I was in a ride that presumably could move, and I made it do just that.
I didn’t turn on the headlights, and the car was old enough that it didn’t have running lights that were always on. It was pretty much ideal for not being seen from a distance. I couldn’t do anything about the sound, but hey, nothing is perfect. I didn’t have to walk for ten miles. It felt like my goddamn birthday.
I drove as fast as the roads would allow. Even on the straight stretches I had to avoid occasional debris, so it wasn’t exactly Mad Max in a hatchback.
Five miles into the trip I figured out why the car had been abandoned: the radiator was fucked. Steam billowed out as yet more lights winked on across the dash, and the temperature gauge edged into the red. I began to regret pushing the car so hard, so fast. Chalk that up to a profound desire to put distance between me and the assholes who took me captive.
I eased up on the gas and babied the car the rest of the way home, or rather the rest of the way to where I was taking it. On the off chance someone noticed the trail of smoke and steam belching from the engine, I didn’t want to draw attention to where I lived. Instead I stopped a mile away and abandoned the car. I hoofed it back to my place.
During that jog several possibilities played out in my head. It was likely Jem brought the others back here and all of them were sleeping in the relative safety of the Lair. If the house was locked, that was okay. I could sleep in the Jeep. I had a spare key for it hidden in my shed.
Keeping my eyes open for zombies, I crunched up the gravel driveway. My pace was slow, footfalls heavy, and I was at the end of my physical and mental endurance when my house came into view over the gentle hill. There wasn’t much I could do about the latter, but I decided to address the former in the coming days and weeks with a diligent helping of cardio exercises.
The lines of my house against the starry sky was wrong. Instead of the expected geometry, a shape sat centered on the roof. I walked up to the house, and from five feet away it was easy to make out the face bundled inside the blanket.
I grinned. “You didn’t have to wait up for me. I wasn’t sure I would make it home tonight.” I tried to keep the words light.
Jem hopped down from his perch on the edge of the roof, landing heavily in front of me. “I never had any doubt.”
As votes of confidence went, it was maybe the nicest thing anyone had ever said about me. Jem was good people.
We went inside together.
14
Everyone let me sleep in. I gave even odds to this being because Jem and his friends were good people, or that no one wanted to wake up the crazy chick with a bunker full of weapons. I was fine either way.
Breakfast—well, late lunch—was composed of a mountain of food that would be first to spoil when the power went out. That the electricity was still on was lucky, as our chunk of the state got its juice from a nuclear plant. I imagined a good number of people probably hunkered down in that plant, which might mean flowing power for a while yet.
I stumbled into the kitchen by following the scent of eggs and bacon like a cartoon character. I was so hungry it would have surprised me not at all to discover I was actually floating through the air. Jem stood at the stove wearing an apron—I owned an apron, apparently—flipping pancakes. Carla and Tony sat at my tiny kitchen table eating.
I flopped into a chair and began to eat voraciously, piling everything I could reach and attacking it with a vengeance. I slurped orange juice noisily, and at first I thought that was why Tony was looking at me in furtive, scattered glances.
“Sorry,” I said. “Starving.”
It was a testament to Tony’s blush that it showed up so well on his dark skin. “Ah, no. I mean, your house. Eat how you want. And you saved my life and all, so I’m not judging. It’s just, uh…”
Carla snorted. “He means you’re not wearing a shirt and he’s too immature to say something.”
I paused, then looked down. Huh.
I mean, I wasn’t naked or anything. Jem helped me out of my gear before tucking me in, gentleman that he was. I was wearing a sports bra, and a wide one at that, which highlighted bruising all along my right side with the coloration and style of really good or really bad modern art.
“Fair enough,” I said, and continued stuffing my face.
Carla reached over and put a hand on my forearm. “Thanks for taking us in, by the way. Jem mentioned after we came back here yesterday that he thought you might be uncomfortable having other people in your home.”
I raised an eyebrow at Jem, who was settling in at the table with a stack of pancakes. He shrugged. “You’re antisocial. Nothing wrong with it. Just wanted them to know this wasn’t your comfort zone.”
“We don’t have to stay long,” Tony said. “There are other places we can hole up. I’ve worked on a lot of construction projects around here.”
“Nope,” I said, putting down my fork. “My discomfort doesn’t outweigh your safety. I’ve got a fucking bunker under this house. I don’t think you’re going to find anywhere safer than that. After what happened to me yesterday, we’re going to need a fortress to retreat to if things go south.”
They’d know by now, of course. I explained the broad strokes to Jem before passing out. It would explain the nervous energy in the room. They tried not to show it, but Carla and Tony seemed to be cautious, as if I were a fragile thing on the edge of breaking.
“You don’t seem bothered,” Jem said, staring at me appraisingly. “Shot at, kidnapped, and escaped. Most people would be shaking right now.”
I sighed and raised my hands. “What do you want? I’ve been through some shit. And yeah, I was scared out of my mind while it was happening, but it’s over now. Isn’t that enough?”
“Of course,” Carla said.
“Sure,” Tony agreed.
Jem just kept staring.
I rolled my eyes. “Ugh. Fine. Any of you news junkies about ten, twelve years ago? Watch a lot of CNN?”
“Not religiously,” Carla said. “But I was in college. I kept up with the news.”
“Okay,” I said, taking a sip of juice. “Do you remember the story about the religious group called the Church of Transcendence?”
Carla nodded. “Yeah, I think so. There was a big FBI bust at their compound, right?”
Tony squinted as if dredging up the details. “They kept children who didn’t behave in a prison under the house there? Right?”
“Yep,” I said, leaning back in my chair. “And one of the kids, a girl who never could wrap her head around the rules, managed to get a message to an outsider. Which was what brought the FBI down on them.”
Jem whistled. “Yeah, I remember that. Big news came a couple years later. She sued the church for their remaining assets…holy shit.”
I smiled thinly. “I always hated my first name. Putting the name Randie on a girl’s birth certificate should constitute child abuse. So back then I went by my middle name, which is Jennifer.”
Carla gaped. “That was you.”
“That was me. Yeah.”
I turned my wrist over, the scar old and faded but still a darker line of brown against my skin. “That’s where I cut my wrist so they’d send me to the hospital. I managed to get a few minutes with the doctor while he was doing my psych evaluation. Turns out they can make the parents leave for a suicide attempt. I told him why I did it, what that hellhole was doing to the kids, everything.”
I stood up and clicked my tongue for Nikola. The big guy stopped being a mound of fur on the couch, unfurling into a dog, and padded over to me. “I’m going for a walk. Nik probably has to go to the bathroom.”
The tears didn’t start until the door closed behind me.
As a general rule, I’m not weepy. I don’t take things personally. I have enough self-confidence to assume that, when things go bad, I’m not somehow the root cause. I took out an abusive cult before I could legally vote. I’m proud of that.
But the hard truth stuck with me through the years, which is why I never talked about it. I knew what I did was right, but that didn’t make it easy. My parents became twisted, evil people, but they had been sweet and loving before. I treasured those memories, both for what they were and for the reminder that even the best of people can warp with enough pressure and time. Under those conditions, some people emerge as diamonds, while others are simply crushed to fit whatever squeezes them.
I like to think of myself as a diamond.
Nik didn’t need to do his business, but he seemed to sense I needed him. We walked around the yard together, his heavy shoulder bumping my leg every time he paused to sniff a patch of grass. He didn’t run off or even move away, but kept close. I repaid him by scratching behind his ears and telling him what a good boy he was.
I wondered if the prison my parents were in had been overrun during the outbreak. The news had been rife with stories of nursing homes, facilities for the mentally ill, group homes for developmentally challenged adults, and even jails being protected by good-hearted people who recognized how terribly the sudden and violent shift in the world would be for those people. Part of me hoped someone recognized the basic humanity of the prisoners where my parents were housed, and let them out.
Another, much more cynical part of me suspected that my parents hadn’t changed. My mom especially. And that maybe literally rotting in a cell after years of figuratively doing so would be a net benefit for the world. At least death would keep them from hurting any more children.
Family holds the greatest potential for being fucked up of any ties that bind in the world. The cognitive dissonance of loving and utterly despising my parents at the same time is proof of it.
Jem was both right and wrong. Emotional trauma and harsh experience do have a way of hardening you, preparing you for the unexpected, but mos
tly in coping with the fallout. No amount of bad shit can stop you from feeling terrified or frightened when you’re in the middle of it. Hell, I had years of fight training under my belt so I could protect myself from ever being helpless again, and I still wanted to puke my heart out in that basement.
It’s like weather and climate. Dealing with the things I’d lived through made it much harder to harm my overall well-being, but damned if I still didn’t feel the storms while they beat down on me.
I walked Nikola back inside after a long few minutes and found everyone sitting in the living room. Jem looked guilty, and I let him. He hadn’t pushed all that much, but I felt zero compulsion to soothe him. If I had to live with my problems, he had to live with his.
“What’s the plan?” Carla said as I closed the door behind me. “Can we risk going back out there with those things running around?”
I felt my eyebrows scrunch together. “Did we hold a vote making me leader?” I put a hand to my chest dramatically. “After all these years, am I finally team captain? Oh, please say it’s true!”
Tony snickered, and it was Carla’s turn to blush.
“Well, it’s your house,” Carla said, soldiering through her embarrassment. “If we’re going to make any runs, we’d have to use your stuff. I didn’t want to make any assumptions.”
“You do have a basement full of weapons,” Tony pointed out. “Best not to piss off people with guns.”
I frowned. “Which reminds me, those assholes still have the ones I had on me yesterday. And my gloves. I’m gonna want those back.”
I didn’t put any particular emphasis on the words, but they hung in the air anyway. After a few seconds I realized how angry I sounded. How much it came across as a threat.
Jem cleared his throat. “If we’re going to stay here long-term, we need to start thinking that way. We’ll need supplies, maybe set up some barriers or something. This place could use some reinforcement, too.”
