Death's Awakening (Eternal Sorrows, #1)

by Sarra Cannon

  How late had it been when she had finally drifted off to sleep? After midnight for sure, but it was easy to lose track of time these days. Each day ran in to the next with no real schedule or purpose. Staying alive seemed to be the only purpose left.

  Parrish slipped out of bed and walked over to the window. She peeked through the blinds, scared of what she might see out there. How many more infected found them in the night?

  But there was no one in sight. The street was empty and the front yard looked almost normal except for some trash that had blown into the yard from a toppled trash can next door.

  Someone knocked on the door and Parrish turned just as Noah opened a small crack in the door. His eyes traveled from the bed to the window, then he smiled. He looked tired.

  “Hey,” he said softly. “I wasn’t sure if you were up yet. I made some coffee downstairs and thought maybe it would be a good time for us to sit and talk if you’re up for it.”

  Parrish looked back through the blinds. “What happened to the infected?” she asked. “Did they leave?”

  Noah opened the door wider and came to stand beside her at the window looking down. His arm touched hers and butterflies stirred in her stomach. She moved an inch to the side, not ready for that feeling.

  Noah glanced her way, then put his hand in his pocket. “As soon as the sun came up, they all headed inside,” he said. “I don’t think they like the natural light for some reason.”

  “How long ago was that? Have you been up all night?”

  He shrugged. “Mostly,” he said. “When the last one left, I laid down on the couch for a little while, but I’m not sure I really slept.”

  Silence passed between them. Noah shifted his weight, then pulled his hand from his pocket.

  “Listen, I’ve been wanting to talk to you about the other night,” he said. “With your mom.”

  Parrish swallowed and turned away, pretending to study something outside. She didn’t really want to talk about that night.

  “I’m really sorry I didn’t go with you to the hospital,” he said. “I feel terrible for just letting you drive off alone. I meant to come talk to you after you got home, but I never got the chance.”

  “It’s fine,” she said, a lump forming in her throat. Tears stung the corners of her eyes, but she pushed them back. If she started thinking about all the things worth crying over, she might never stop. “You were really brave just to come over there with everything you already knew about the virus. You risked your life to help me.”

  Noah touched her arm and the spot tingled with the warmth of his touch. Part of her wanted to pull away, but part of her wanted to lean in to him. To throw her arms around him.

  “I should have done more,” he said. He cleared his throat and ran his thumb back and forth across her skin. “Parrish—”

  Something crashed downstairs.

  A moment of panic rushed through her. What if those things had gotten through the boarded up windows? What if she hadn’t nailed them in tight enough? She ran, Noah close behind her on the stairs.

  When they got downstairs, they ran through the hall, into the living room and finally, to the kitchen. They found Karmen standing beside the island, surrounded by a pile of pots and pans, flour on her face and pancake batter in her hair.

  Parrish wanted to kill her. “What the heck are you doing down here? You scared us to death with all that banging.”

  Karmen looked up, pouting. “I’m trying to be sweet and make breakfast,” she said. “I can’t find the right kind of pan, though. Noah, what the hell is up with your kitchen? Nothing is where it should be in here. It’s like every cabinet I open has some new disaster behind it.”

  Noah laughed. “No Mom, remember? It’s been just me and Dad for a long time. We don’t really cook.”

  “Then why do you have all this stuff?” Karmen gestured to the pots on the floor. “Obviously someone cooks.”

  “No, not really,” he said, hopping up to sit on one of the bar stools. “When we moved here, the house was already furnished. I don’t think anyone’s opened those cabinets in years.”

  “Lucky me.” Karmen used her right hand to brush her hair from her eyes and left a giant glob of pancake batter on her forehead. The three of them looked at one another, then burst out laughing.

  *

  An hour later, they sat at the dining room table, remnants of a huge breakfast feast on their plates.

  Parrish stretched, then reached for her coffee cup. “Gosh, I haven’t eaten like that in a week,” she said. “I’ve been living off cheese and crackers at my house.”

  “Peanut butter,” Karmen said. “I’ve eaten two entire jars of peanut butter all by myself this week.”

  Noah laughed and Parrish studied him from the corner of her eye. Even tired, he was gorgeous. His dark blond hair curled slightly on top and his brown eyes were almost golden when he smiled.

  “That was so good, Karmen. Where did you learn to cook like that?” he asked, throwing his napkin down on top of his leftover chocolate chip pancakes.

  “I have hidden talents,” Karmen said with a wink. “Believe it or not, my grandmother taught me to cook years ago before she got sick.”

  With the mention of the word sick, everyone grew quiet. As much as she wanted to pretend that this was just a happy Saturday morning get-together with friends, Parrish couldn’t ignore the fact that there were boards over the windows for a reason.

  “What are we going to do?” She looked both of her companions in the eyes, hoping at least one of them had some good ideas about what happened next.

  “What do you mean?” Karmen asked. “We’re staying here until someone comes to get us.”

  Parrish rolled her eyes.

  “No one’s coming to get us,” she said. “Half the world’s population is sick or dead from this virus, and now half or more of those people are trying to eat the few of us who are still alive. It’s every man for himself out there.”

  As the words left her lips, Parrish immediately thought of her sister in New York City. She was all alone up there as far as Parrish knew. She didn’t think there was any way their father had recovered from the sickness. And what if it was worse? What if he’d turned in to one of those things that had attacked them last night? How would Zoe survive something like that?

  She needed to get to her sister. But how? New York would be the worst possible place to be on the planet right now.

  “Don’t be silly.” Karmen rose from the table and started collecting plates. “Someone always comes. We just have to wait this out. Once the government gets this figured out and under control, they’ll send in the Army or National Guard or whatever.”

  Noah grabbed more plates and followed her in to the kitchen. “It’s not that simple.”

  “There’s not going to be any more government. No Army. No police.” Parrish turned on the water in the sink and took a plate from the stack of dirties. “There’s just going to be people like us. Random survivors spread all over the country, fighting against whatever these things are.”

  “That can’t be right,” Karmen said. Her shoulders slumped. “I mean, how can that be right? There are billions of people out there. They can’t all be dead.”

  Parrish wasn’t sure if she wanted to hug her or strangle her for being so naive. “At this point, who really knows what the world looks like? All you have to do is look outside on this street, though, to get some kind of idea. How many people do you think are still alive right here in our little neighborhood? How many people have you seen walking their dogs or driving to the store?”

  Karmen closed her eyes and put her head in her hands.

  “We have to be realistic,” Noah said, passing a plate Karmen’s way. When she refused to take it and put it away, he reached over her and opened the cabinet, putting the plate away himself.

  Parrish almost laughed at the irony of the situation. No parents to tell them to do the dishes and yet, here they were, cleaning up after themselves. Voluntar
ily.

  “It’s possible no one is coming to help us for a very long time,” he said. “Possibly never. We need to come up with some kind of plan for how we’re going to survive this thing.”

  “How much food do you have in the house?” Parrish asked. It was the first thing that came to mind. As long as they had food and water, they could hide out here for months if that’s what it took.

  Noah crossed over to the pantry and opened it. He frowned. “Not much,” he said. “I told you we don’t really cook. We get delivery a lot. There’s a ton of frozen food, though. Here and in the chest freezer outside. The problem is if we lose power, we’ll lose all of that.”

  “Lose power?” Karmen screeched. She stomped her foot like a child who wasn’t getting her way. “Don’t you think you guys are both overreacting just a little bit?”

  “No,” Parrish said. Karmen was getting on her last nerve. “Don’t you remember what we went through last night? Can you seriously not see what’s going on in the world? If we’re going to survive, we have to be smart and think ahead.”

  “Well, I think the smartest thing to do is turn on the TV or the radio and see what the news is saying,” she said. “Surely someone out there has a plan they want us to follow. The best place to tell us about it would be on TV or the internet or somewhere public. I think we should check there before we start making grand predictions about losing power and living off the land or whatever.”

  Parrish, to her own surprise, actually thought this was a good idea. Not that she wanted to give Karmen the satisfaction of thinking she’d been right about something. “Maybe turning on the TV or the radio isn’t the worst idea you’ve had.”

  Unfortunately, when they flipped on the big screen in Noah’s living room, every channel held the same message. A black screen with white text read:

  Survivors are instructed to stay in their homes. Do not open your doors to strangers. If someone in your household is sick or infected, quarantine them to a single room in the house and board up the doors.

  Parrish stared at the screen, a feeling of dread rumbling in her stomach. This was the best advice the government could come up with? Stay inside and board up the doors. They’d done all that on instinct and they were just a small group of teenagers. Couldn’t the best minds in the country come up with something a little more creative?

  They really were all alone.

  Karmen

  Three days later, Karmen stood in the middle of the large walk-in closet. She shook her head in disappointment. There was absolutely nothing wearable in there.

  She reached for the closest rack and started pulling shirts down the rod one at a time.

  Noah’s dad had nothing but brown suits in here. The same brown suit in variation, over and over again. She didn’t see a single t-shirt or casual polo. Nothing. There was a stack of plain white undershirts in one of the middle cubbies, but when she pulled it out and held it over her body, she shook her head. She looked inside at the tag. XL. Great. It might as well have been a tent.

  She opened the drawers looking for boxers, but those were way too big too. They just slid right down and she wasn’t about to wear a fifty year old man’s boxers with a belt. Yuck.

  She thought about asking Noah for clothes. Most guys thought it was sexy when a girl wore their clothes. But both Noah and Parrish had been keeping to themselves the past few days. No one was really talking to each other.

  She needed her own clothes, and that was that.

  She’d been wearing the same white tank top and pink shorts for the past four days. She’d washed the same pair of underwear four times in the sink. She was done. She needed fresh clothes. Noah and Parrish had ganged up on her last time she’d mentioned it, saying it was too risky for her to go over there. They didn’t care that those things only came out at night. No, they swore it was too dangerous because there was no way to know if one of them had wandered into her house.

  But she knew she’d locked all the doors. There was no way one of those things had gotten inside. It wasn’t like they had keys or anything.

  She’d made her mind up, and she didn’t care what they had to say about it.

  In fact, she wasn’t even going to tell them she was going. They’d just talk her out of it or try to scare her. But it was ten in the morning. There wouldn’t be any infected wandering around this early, especially when the sun was shining as bright as it was today.

  Karmen tiptoed down the hall and listened in at Parrish’s door. She was in there playing Mozart again. Her favorite sleeping music. Parrish had been staying up at night, watching the rotters walk back and forth under the street lamps. Then she’d sleep half the day away. It was weird.

  But with Parrish asleep, it was the perfect time to go out.

  Noah was downstairs in the basement. Again. She’d seen him sneak off down there sometime around eight this morning, which usually meant he wouldn’t show his face until lunchtime. She had no idea what he was doing down there all the time, but whatever it was, at least he was out of her hair for now.

  The guy was weirder than she ever knew. Hot, but weird.

  No one would even know she’d gone. All she had to do was figure out the easiest way in and out of the house. The front door was too barricaded to ever go out that way. There had to be at least fifteen boards across the front. But the back only had five. She could remove those boards and make her way around the back of the house, through the back gate.

  It seemed better than trying to squeeze through one of the windows.

  The garage door was out because it would make too much noise going up and down. The back door was her best choice.

  She grabbed the hammer and went to work, being as quiet as she could as she pulled the nails from the boards.

  It took longer than she’d planned, but as soon as she had all the boards removed, she unlocked the door and walked out into the back yard. She stood on the steps for a few seconds, letting the summer breeze warm her skin. She’d been in that house way too long without any fresh air.

  She crossed behind the house and unlatched the gate, then walked into the side yard. She instantly felt exposed. As if every rotter in the neighborhood was now watching her cross the lawn, looking at her juicy skin and wanting a taste.

  She glanced down at the wound on her leg. It had actually been healing faster than she expected, but what if they could smell the old blood on her or something?

  She shuddered, almost turning around. But then she thought about having to wear the same panties for the rest of her life and kept walking. When she crossed the street, she actually looked both ways out of habit, then laughed. They hadn’t seen a car come through here in the past two days. They’d heard squealing tires and a crash last night, but nothing since.

  Everyone was either locked up in their houses, barricading themselves against the infected; or they were dead. Like her parents probably were by now. She’d left her cell phone in her house, so she had no idea if they’d tried to call her, but she wasn’t holding her breath.

  Good riddance to her dad, but she was really going to miss her mom.

  It felt so weird to walk up the front steps of her own house. She never came in this way. They always parked in the garage or the side of the house and came in through that side entrance. The front door was hardly ever used.

  But that’s where they kept the spare key. She’d dropped her own house keys somewhere in Parrish’s house and wasn’t about to go back over there to look for them.

  She lifted the fake flower from the pot next to the door and reached underneath to grab the little black key box. Relief flooded through her. It was still there.

  Of course, why wouldn’t it be? It wasn’t like the rotters knew how to find keys and open doors. She’d tried not to pay much attention to them, but Parrish had been watching them every night and reporting back on their behavior, so she knew they weren’t exactly the most intelligent things in the world.

  Still, she was glad the key was there. She tossed t
he fake flower to the ground and slid the key in the lock.

  The inside of her house was freezing and she hugged herself, rubbing her hands across the skin of her arms. She must have left the air on high this whole time. Not that it mattered. Who was really going to come asking her to pay the power bill? The world had gone to shit. They might as well enjoy air conditioning while they still had it.

  She opened the hall closet and grabbed her suede coat off the rack. She pulled it on, knowing she had to look completely ridiculous and almost wishing there were people alive who still might care about something like that.

  She went up the stairs and straight to her own bedroom, throwing herself on her waterbed. She loved that bed. Noah’s dad’s bed wasn’t completely uncomfortable, but it wasn’t her own bed. She missed her own sheets. Her own pillows. Her clothes. Her music. Everything.

  She sat up and looked around.

  Why couldn’t she just stay here? She could probably stretch what little food was left in the kitchen to last her a couple of weeks. And she had everything she needed here. Her own shower. Her curling iron. Her makeup. Plus, she had full cable here. No more of that basic cable crap she’d been forced to watch at Noah’s. Sure, some of the daytime soaps were fine, but she hated not having access to her favorite reality shows and fashion tips. He didn’t even have a computer at his house unless that was what he was keeping in hidden in the basement this whole time. Totally lame.

  Besides, if she stayed here, she wouldn’t have to deal with an emo Parrish Sorrows. What was that girl’s problem anyway? She was a dark cloud hanging over everyone at that house with her black clothes and her doomsday prophesies. That girl needed an attitude adjustment. It was hard to believe they’d actually liked each other at one point. Karmen couldn’t see a single thing the two of them had in common anymore.

  And she definitely didn’t like the way Noah kept looking at Parrish. There was something in his gaze that made her so mad.

  Karmen had thought being locked in a house with him for a few days would be a dream come true, but he’d been acting strange lately too. Besides the whole end-of-the-word stuff and the mooning-over-Parrish stuff, he’d been strangely distant, always going down in that basement to do God-knows-what. Of course, he was still completely crush-worthy, and the two times she’d caught him with his shirt off had made the whole camping-in thing worth it as far as she was concerned.