They were memories.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Kyle slapped the bathroom door. “Annie!” he said, his heart racing. “What’s going on in there?”
She was crying hysterically from down near the floor.
“Hell’s her problem?” Roland said from his post in the front.
“She’s had a rough couple of weeks,” Kyle said and slapped the door again. He tried the knob, but it wouldn’t turn.
“The rest of us have been on vacation?” Roland said.
Kyle ignored him. “Annie!” Parker and Hughes joined him at the door.
“We need to calm her down,” Parker said. “Dangerous making this kind of racket in here.”
“Would you please,” Kyle said, “worry about someone other than yourself for a change? Annie!”
“I’m worried about everyone here, Kyle. If enough of those things outside hear us, everybody could die, including your girlfriend.”
Annie quieted down.
“Annie,” Kyle said. “Can you open the door? Let me help you.”
After a moment’s pause she said, “I’m okay.” She did not sound okay. “I’m sorry, just give me a minute.”
“I’ll be right out here,” Kyle said.
Jesus, what was wrong with that girl? He had feelings for her, he could not deny that, but if he’d met her a few months earlier, before it all went sideways, he’d be spooked off her. He’d dismiss her as damaged and high-maintenance. But he couldn’t dismiss her like that. Not now.
Everybody was cracking. Lane and Roland were damn near psychotic, though they might have been fine even recently. Parker was borderline. Carol was a human-shaped basket case. Frank wasn’t bright enough to freak out in any way that was interesting. Hughes seemed to keep it together okay, but Kyle was sure that was just a facade.
And what about Kyle himself? How was he doing, really?
The bathroom door opened. Annie emerged with her cheeks puffy and her eyes bloodshot and wild. Kyle wanted to hug her.
“My memories came back,” she said.
* * *
She remembered it all, including what happened right after she had coffee with her sister in downtown Olympia. She had gotten back in her car, turned on the radio, and driven toward Seattle. NPR said a bizarre outbreak of some rabies-like virus at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo International Airport was wrecking havoc in Russia and spreading at an alarming rate in Europe and Asia. There was even a possible outbreak in Seattle, but that could not yet be confirmed.
That was why her memory had ended with meeting her sister. It was the last normal thing she did before the world changed.
She remembered hunkering down in her apartment until fear and dread and chaos and death swept her neighborhood. She remembered running in terror down the streets and all but crashing into her friend Blake from college. Blake who she suspected had a thing for her. Blake who owned a motorcycle. Blake who gave her a ride.
They rode the interstate toward Olympia. They both wanted out of Seattle, and Annie had to get to her sister. She and Blake could stay with Jenny if it was safer. But Olympia wasn’t safer. It swarmed with the infected, so they rode onward toward Oregon. Portland would almost certainly be just as dangerous, but they planned to turn first and head inland, east, toward Mount Rainier National Park, where nobody but park rangers lived.
She and Blake didn’t make it. The interstate was so jam-packed with cars from the mass exodus that they couldn’t even ride on the shoulder. They had to ride on the grass next to the interstate, and even that was crowded with cars in some places. People were milling about everywhere on the sides of the freeway, some walking north, some walking south, and some heading down side roads and even into the trees.
They took a side road to a back road to a dirt road to a track to an empty cabin in a dark forest that looked and felt prehistoric. She and Blake went inside and found a pantry full of food. Out back they found gas cans for a generator and some prechopped wood for the fireplace.
They went inside, drew the curtains, locked the doors, made no sound.
A hushed stillness settled over the world.
Annie and Blake lived there for weeks, subsisting on dry goods in the pantry but not daring to start a fire or use the generator.
Nobody ever came up the road.
The food ran out, as they knew it would, but they waited before looking for more. Waited four days until hunger compelled them to get back on Blake’s motorcycle and ride to the nearest town—some exurb outside Olympia that might have unlooted food in a store if they were lucky.
The motorcycle made a terrible racket that seemed like the only sound on earth. Every infected person within a five-mile radius must have heard it, but there was nothing else they could do. They might die looking for food, but they would surely die if they stayed in the cabin. Leaving at least gave them a chance.
They rode fast and hard on the back road, but the main road was snarled with cars. Blake steered carefully around them and had to take the bike onto the shoulder a couple of times. After clearing a Greyhound bus on the road, they were mobbed by a swarm of the infected and thrown over the handlebars. Four or five of them poured on Blake at the same time. She was unarmed. She couldn’t save him. So she ran away screaming and one of them, also screaming, launched itself at her from the side and they went down together.
It bit her on the back beneath her shoulder. She remembered it clearly now. The pain was exquisite, like someone was digging out her flesh with a jagged-edged scoop. That thing actually tried to take a bite out of her. It wanted to eat her alive. But she turned over and flailed, kicked, and punched it as hard as she could, then she jabbed her thumbs in its eyes. It shrieked in rage while she shrieked in terror and pain.
Blake had stopped screaming. He was gone. He was being consumed. The five that killed him were so busy with his body that they forgot all about her.
She ran into the forest, stumbling in shock and pain and alarm. She ran for maybe an hour before collapsing next to a log, then fell asleep and woke as a monster. A vicious thing, a hungry hungry predator that stalked humans and killed them and ate them.
She was not going to talk about it. The others would kill her for sure. Probably not Kyle, but Lane and Roland certainly would. Parker, too, and perhaps even Hughes. Hughes had already shot at her once.
But she wasn’t infected. At least not anymore. She was immune. Her body fought off the virus and she recovered.
Right?
That’s what happened, right?
She wasn’t going to turn again.
Was she?
She didn’t think so. She wasn’t stupid. She knew how viruses and immunity worked. Every virus meets effective resistance in some people, even among populations that have no immunity. Some people got Ebola and lived. Some people used to get smallpox and live. Some survived the bubonic plague. Even Native Americans, who had no effective resistance to European diseases, survived in small numbers. No virus killed everyone. Otherwise the human race would no longer exist—though the health of her species wasn’t looking too good anymore.
But no, she was no longer infected. She was immune. She probably wouldn’t get sick again even if she recontracted the virus.
Probably.
But that’s not necessarily how the others would see it. They might look at her and see carrier. Typhoid Annie. With blood and sweat and spit boiling with the virus even if it no longer affected her. Maybe they’d be afraid she’d relapse.
And maybe she would.
What if the disease is less like the flu and more like AIDS or malaria or herpes? Malaria victims relapsed. People with herpes had relapses. Maybe she ought to stay away from everyone else for the rest of her life.
She had no idea, so she wouldn’t tell anybody. She didn’t dare.
She also couldn’t tell anyone because she couldn’t bear the fact that she’d killed people. She actually ate people, or parts of them anyway. Her mind had been completely and utterly bent.
/> She did worse things to her fellow human beings than everyone else in that grocery store put together, including Lane and Bobby and Roland.
And she knew now why Lane recognized her. She had attacked his crew in a house somewhere in the area. It must have happened within the past couple of days. She killed one of his people and he saw her do it.
The reason Lane couldn’t remember where he saw her face was because he was cycling through his memories of all the healthy people he’d seen and met. He came up empty because it never even occurred to him—and why would it?—that when he saw her face, she was one of those things.
* * *
Parker sat silently in the cooler and plotted. He couldn’t take it anymore. He liked exactly one of his companions—Hughes—and to hell with the rest.
Wouldn’t be a bad idea, once he got to a proper location, to dig trenches around a house or a cabin and fill them with Punji sticks. The Viet Cong did that during the Vietnam war. They smeared shit on those sticks to infect everybody who stepped on them. That wouldn’t work with these things. Sure, an infection would eventually kill them. They weren’t vampires. You didn’t have to stab them in the heart or shoot them with silver bullets or cut off their heads. But they had to be taken down instantly. He’d need a deep trench, a moat, and some really long sticks.
* * *
Okay, everybody,” Lane said from his guard post near the door. Annie hated that he stayed put up there. She knew why he did it. He could see almost everyplace in the store when the light was good, but mostly he did it to make sure no one got past him and out. “We can’t stay here any longer.” He had his hands on his hips. “It’s too dangerous. I’m sending two of you out on another run for some bicycles. Maybe Annie and Kyle, but first I want to be sure Annie’s up for it.”
She didn’t like that he was even thinking about her, let alone talking about her. It was only a matter of time before he figured out where he’d seen her before. She wanted to melt away into the walls.
“Annie,” he said. “You okay, hon? Let’s go talk in the back.”
Hon? Who the hell was he kidding calling her hon? As if he had any affection for anyone but himself. She didn’t even want Kyle calling her hon. Not yet, anyway.
“Come on,” Lane said and headed back toward the bathrooms. Roland took his place at the front door like the guard he was with his arms folded over his chest and the butt of his pistol prominently protruding from the top of his pants.
She patted her right pocket. She still had Bobby’s small knife. She wasn’t going anywhere near Lane without it, especially not alone. But she didn’t move. She just stood there next to the empty donut rack.
“Come on,” Lane said again. “I’m not going to do anything. We just need to talk.”
He sounded reasonable, like he was concerned for her well-being after a really rough night, but she didn’t buy it. She walked toward him with tremendous reluctance, knowing he could force her if he had to and that he would.
He stopped in front of the men’s bathroom. “Let’s go inside. So we can talk privately.”
She froze again. He could see that she was afraid. It was all over his face and hers.
He put his hands up like he was surrendering. Then he untucked his gun from the front of his pants and tucked it into the back of his pants. As if that made any real difference. “I swear to you, Annie, I just want to talk.”
He sounded so sincere, almost hurt that she was afraid of him, as if she’d misjudged him. It was an act, but a damn good one because she actually felt, against her better judgment, like she was being unreasonable. She wanted to pat her right pocket again and feel the knife, but he’d notice if she did. And the knife wouldn’t help anyway because she’d have to fish it out and unfold it before she could do anything with it.
“Annie, please,” Lane said.
She found it amazing that she was just as afraid of being rude as she was of being alone with him in the bathroom. What kind of dysfunctional thinking was that? It was nuts, but people felt that way all the time, and dangerous men knew how to exploit it.
She followed him into the bathroom but did not lock the door. The men’s room was the mirror image of the women’s room, only with more graffiti on the walls.
His tone changed at once.
“What’s up?” he said, but he didn’t say it the way friends and acquaintances say it. He said it like an angry boss wondering why an employee can’t get their shit straight.
“Excuse me?” she said. “You’re the one who wanted to talk.”
He leaned against the paper-towel dispenser and folded his arms. “You said your memory came back.”
She swallowed like she was gulping a frog. He saw. She was never any good at hiding her nervousness. “It did.”
“Well?”
“Well, what?” She felt her face flush hot. “I remember a lot of bad things now like everyone else.”
“Something that made you scream. Something that gave you fits in the night.”
“What does it matter?” She shifted her weight from one foot to the other. “It has nothing to do with you or this store or the boat we need to be getting to.”
“It matters,” he said, “because you don’t want to talk about it. Because I’m trying to decide if I should send you back out there or if you should stay here and cool off or whatever it is you need to do to get better.”
“Why do you care?” she said. “Send someone else if you don’t think I can handle it.”
“Listen. I know you’re not stupid. And I’m pretty sure you’re smart enough to know that I’m not stupid either. I sent you and Kyle out yesterday for a reason. It can’t be that hard to figure out why.”
Because she and Kyle were competent enough to get the job done and not ruthless enough to disarm Bobby and come back in here shooting.
“Okay,” she said. “So send me out again. I’m fine. Really. I wasn’t last night, but I’m okay now.”
She wanted so badly to pat her right pocket and feel her knife there against the front of her leg, but he would know.
“There’s something you’re not telling me,” he said.
“You don’t want to hear my shit story. My entire family is probably dead.”
“Probably? So you did not see them die.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Yes, you did.”
“What do you care?”
“Because I know you from somewhere.”
She thought about the gun tucked into the back of his pants. She couldn’t see it, but there was no way she’d forget it was there. And neither would he.
“You and I will not be okay until I know where I’ve seen you before,” he said. “I can’t for the life of me figure out why the fuck I can’t place you, but you know. Don’t you? I saw it written all over your face when you woke up this morning. You admitted to everyone that you got your memory back, and now that you remember, you can’t even look at me.”
She would have killed him the night he saw her face if he hadn’t run out the back of that house. She must have looked horrendous then, and horrendously different, but he was going to figure it out eventually.
“I don’t know, okay?” she said. He was right. She couldn’t look at him. Not in the eye. “I don’t remember everything.”
“You’re lying.” He grabbed her shoulders and pushed her against the wall.
She turned her head away from him.
“Don’t,” she whispered. “Please.”
“I wouldn’t care, Annie, if you weren’t so obviously hell-bent on keeping it from me. Were you with those people? The ones who robbed me last week? I don’t remember seeing you with them, but I must have. I must have. It’s the only thing that makes any sense.”
“No,” she said. And she started to cry. She tried not to, but she couldn’t help it.
And she realized at that moment that she had a decision to make. She’d have to do one of four things. She could continue to lie even though he knew she wa
s lying and wait for him to resort to more extreme measures. She could scream and hope someone would help her, though Roland would probably put a stop to any of that. She could fight him, though the odds that she’d get her knife out and open in time were minuscule. Or she could tell him.
She decided to tell him.
* * *
She did it this way: She said, “I need to show you something. It’s not what you’re expecting. And it’s not what you’re going to think when I first show you.”
After a momentary pause, he said, “Okay.”
“What I’m going to show you will answer your question,” she said.
He looked intrigued now and a bit more at ease. Exactly what she wanted.
“But before I show you,” she said, “I need you to understand that it’s not what it looks like. Okay?”
“Okay.”
He trusted her! She could tell. He looked at her in a way he hadn’t before. You can tell when people trust you and when they don’t. It’s obvious. And Lane trusted her, at least at that moment.
She was going to show him something and he was going to lose his goddamn mind. Which was fine. As long as it bought her a couple of seconds.
“But I need you to promise me something,” she said.
“Promise you what?”
“I need you to promise me that you understand in advance that what I’m about to show you is not what it looks like. So after you see it, you need to let me explain.”
“Explain it to me first,” he said.
“I can’t. Because my explanation won’t make a damn bit of sense if you haven’t first seen it. So just watch and then listen. Okay?”
“Fine.” He was a little more dubious now. That wasn’t good. But she had a plan.
She positioned herself so Lane couldn’t see her back in the mirror, then took off her shirt. The only clothing above her waist now was her bra.
“Annie,” Lane said and turned his head. “That’s not why I—”
“Shh. Remember what I said? It’s not what you think.”
“If you think—”
Resurrection: A Zombie Novel Page 11
