Just Another Day in the Zombie Apocalypse (Episode 7)

by L. C. Mortimer

  As a teenager, Torrance had worked in a local grocery store. She was only a cashier: nobody of importance. Everyone ignored her unless they needed something, except for Alexander. Alexander wanted her to succeed. He wanted her to do well. He had taken her under his wing and shown her everything she needed to know about running the entire business.

  Soon Torrance learned how to manage the warehouse, how to take inventory, and how to order before the store ran out of stock. She learned how to document which items were selling quickly and which ones weren’t profitable. She figured out exactly what it took to keep the grocery store running perfectly.

  It had been years since that summer. It had been years since she’d sat side-by-side with Alexander, pouring over inventory slips and order forms. It had been years, but she still remembered all of the lessons he taught her, and today, Torrance was going to use those lessons.

  She got a piece of paper and grabbed a pen, and then Torrance started writing.

  First off, they were going to need water. They were going to need lots of it. They could always melt snow if they were in a bind, but that wasn’t always the safest option. Who knew how polluted the snow was when it fell? She didn’t think the virus was airborne, but she shuddered at the idea that there could be zombie virus particles floating around in the air. If they were going to melt snow or collect rainwater, they’d need a filtration system.

  Torrance wrote bleach on the sheet of paper and kept going. She’d learned a lot about how to filter and collect water during her time in Raven, but she was certain they could find plenty of bottled water, too. There had to be tons of it in the houses and stores surrounding the area. With the car Mark and Alice had brought, they’d be able to go out, collect tons of water, and bring it back in one trip. It wouldn’t matter how heavy the water was because that was a huge freaking vehicle.

  She added coffee filters to the list because those could be used for filtering water, as well. Oh, they wouldn’t be as good as filtering water as regular old bleach would be, but they’d work in a bind. It was going to be a long winter and every little bit would help.

  Torrance went around the kitchen and looked at the other supplies they had. They already had pots and pans and dishes and silverware, but they could use more cleaning supplies. She added that to her list, and then she started to consider their menu for the next few months.

  They’d been living off of granola bars and cereal, which was fine, but that wasn’t sustainable for a healthy diet in the long term. They didn’t have access to a dentist or a doctor. They couldn’t afford to be getting cavities or sick because they weren’t eating healthy food. No, what this little group of survivors needed was a healthy diet plan.

  She wrote down fruit and then added a question mark next to it because she wasn’t sure how reasonable it was going to be to acquire fruit or vegetables. They could get canned items, but even those would go bad after awhile. If only they were closer to a military base and could find things like fucking MREs. That’s what they needed.

  Then Torrance remembered there was a camping and sporting goods store one town over. Maybe they would have things like freeze-dried vegetables, fruits, and meats. It wouldn’t exactly give them a well-rounded diet, but it was something. She wrote down her idea and kept going.

  By the time she had finished compiling a list of supplies and things to check out before the winter, over an hour had passed. The others still weren’t back yet. It wasn’t surprising. They would probably be gone until nightfall. Torrance could find other things to keep herself busy.

  She sorted things in the kitchen and arranged the canned goods. She made sure to organize things by the expiration date so the oldest foods got eaten first. When she was finished, she hobbled back to the living room and sat down in front of the fireplace.

  It was a silly thing, this world. Only weeks ago she’d been planning for a future with her son. She worried about whether he was good enough at reading or whether he’d be able to get along with the other kids at school. She focused on work, and being a good mother, and on dealing with parent-teacher meetings.

  She didn’t think about the best ways to kill zombies.

  She didn’t think about the best way to survive winter without a grocery store.

  She curled up on the couch and examined her leg. The swelling had gone down and her ankle looked normal. There wouldn’t be any permanent damage. No, now all she had to do was sit and wait for the rest of her body to heal.

  All she had to do was wait for the rest of the group to come back.

  Torrance read a book, and then walked around the building some more. She had already checked everything there was to check. She’d gone through the dressers and the closets with Kyle. They’d found everything useful they were going to find.

  Finally, she went back to the kitchen and began to make herself lunch. She wasn’t going to heal if she didn’t eat, after all. She was distracted, and her mind was focused on feeling sorry for herself, so when she knocked her water to the ground, Torrance was pissed.

  “Fuck,” she said aloud. She grabbed a cloth and began to clean the spill. So much for preserving water. As she was drying the water, though, Torrance noticed some of the liquid had gone between the floorboards. There was one area where the gaps between the boards were wider than they should have been.

  “What the hell?”

  She looked closer, and then ran her fingers along the space. It wasn’t that there were gaps for no reason: there was a secret door in the floor, but there was no handle to lift it up. Torrance tried to ply the wood up using only her fingers, but she couldn’t get it. She hopped up and grabbed a butter knife, then came back to try again. Slowly, painfully, she eased one edge of the trapdoor up, and then she peeked into the darkness.

  Chapter 9

  Alice walked in circles around the hole, trying to figure out how the hell they were going to get out. She wasn’t listening to what Mark and Kyle were talking about. She tuned out their conversation about methods of escaping and instead tried to use her damn brain.

  How?

  How were they going to get out of here?

  She walked along the base of the hole. It was much too wide to simply climb up. If it was narrow, she’d be able to support herself on either side of the hole and climb out, but she couldn’t. It was too wide for that, and Kyle didn’t have a rope.

  Why, oh why, hadn’t they brought rope?

  It was such a simple thing, but in their excitement to leave, they’d left the most important thing of all.

  “Maybe I should go back,” Kyle was saying. As if there was time for that. No, if the watcher had dug this hole, had set this trap, then they didn’t know how much time they’d have before he came back.

  But that begged another question: why would a zombie dig a hole? This wasn’t just some random hole. This entire thing had been carefully planned and designed, and even though Alice knew the watchers were intelligent, they weren’t that smart: were they?

  Were they really wise enough to know how to perfectly engineer a trap like this?

  Somehow, she doubted it.

  Mark and Kyle hadn’t come to that conclusion yet, but Alice thought this was the work of a human for sure. Maybe it was a zombie trap or perhaps her fears of cannibalism had already come to life. She wasn’t sure. All she knew was that time was running out and they needed to get out of the hole.

  Fast.

  Alice had lost weight since the outbreak. She wasn’t fat before the apocalypse happened, but she had been curvy. She didn’t know how much weight she’d lost, but her clothes were looser now, and she was thinner.

  “I could lift Alice to you,” Mark said. “And you could pull her up.”

  “Don’t think I can, man,” Kyle grunted out, and Alice jerked her head up.

  “Did you get hurt when you fell? Kyle? Are you okay?”

  “I’m all right,” he said. “Just need a couple of stitches and I’ll be fine.” He sounded brave, but his face was tight, and
Alice wondered how much time they had.

  “I have an idea,” Alice said, and she started reaching for the roots that were on the side of the hole.

  “What the hell? There’s no way those are going to hold you,” Mark said, but she tried anyway. Alice reached for the roots above her head and pulled herself up. Her shoulders burned and her arms stung, but she started to climb anyway. Her feet found roots, as well, and she slipped her shoes in the spaces between the corded roots of the trees and the packed dirt.

  “I’ll be damned,” Kyle said.

  “You’ve got this,” Mark told her, suddenly optimistic. “You’ve got this.”

  Alice was shocked she was moving so fast. She hadn’t been working out particularly hard, but then, that was life after zombies. You learned new things and you learned them quickly. Today she was learning that if she didn’t hurry, she was going to fall back into the hole and then she’d really be fucked.

  Alice climbed as fast as she could, straining to hold onto each root she reached. She cringed as she heard the sound of the roots tearing under her weight. When she was close to the top, Kyle reached for her just as her hand slipped. He grabbed her wrist, pulled hard, and then she was over the top.

  “Sorry,” he said. “I hope I didn’t hurt you. Are you okay?”

  “Fuck,” she groaned. She was lying on the ground on her back, and everything hurt. She looked at her bleeding hands and shook her head. The roots had been tearing into her skin, but she’d ignored it. She was trying too hard to focus, too hard to just get over the edge of the hole.

  Now she was free, but hurt, and they still had to fucking get Mark out.

  “I have an idea,” he yelled up at them. “Kyle, what else do you have in the backpack?”

  “Um,” Kyle shifted and reached for the bag. Alice noticed his hand was holding the side of his body.

  “You’re hurt,” she pointed out. “Try not to move.” When Kyle adjusted his position, Alice saw the blood on his hand, and she ripped her shirt off. “Take it,” she said. “Use it to stop the bleeding.”

  “It’s not too bad,” Kyle said, but Alice ignored him and reached for the backpack.

  “Okay,” she told Mark. “We’ve got water bottles, a knife, granola bars, a couple of guns, and ammo.”

  “Plus your bat,” Mark said.

  “Plus my bat.”

  “I’m too heavy for the roots,” Mark said. He jumped up and grabbed a couple, tried to pull himself up the way Alice had, but they tore under the weight of his body. He landed on his feet and frowned. “All right, let’s try this. Empty the water bottle and cut it in half.”

  “What?”

  “Just give the water to Kyle. You don’t have to waste it.”

  “Kyle, chug this,” she handed him a water bottle and Kyle quietly drank the entire thing. “All right. It’s empty. One second.” Alice fidgeted with the knife and used it to slice the plastic bottle in half. “Now what?”

  “Toss me the bottom half.”

  She threw the bottom half of the bottle to Mark and he caught it easily. Alice peeked down at him.

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Just give me some light, okay?”

  He tucked his own flashlight into his waistband and with a deep breath, started using the cup to dig little holes in the side of the large hole.

  “You’re digging hand holds,” she gasped. Of course. Mark would be able to grasp the side of the hole with his hands and feet and simply climb out of the hole. It was the perfect plan.

  “We’ll see if it works,” Mark said. He got to work and Alice waited quietly, watching him. She held the flashlight so he could see what he was doing. It seemed to take forever, but finally Mark was finished.

  “All right,” he looked up at her and winked. “Here goes nothing.”

  Chapter 10

  When Mark tumbled over the edge of the hole, he took a deep breath. He’d never been so damn happy to be in open air before, never been so happy to feel the ground beneath his back.

  “You did it,” Alice kissed him. “You did it.”

  He nodded, but didn’t say anything. He needed a minute to catch his breath. That climb had been harder than it should have been. Fuck. When did he get so out of shape? He would have thought surviving for so long in the apocalypse would have given him more strength, more agility, but it hadn’t.

  He was just weak.

  He hadn’t been eating well and although his nightmares hadn’t been as bad lately, his sleep was still disturbed. He hadn’t had a good, predictable routine in awhile, and his body was suffering for it.

  Mark wanted to be strong.

  He wanted to be the kind of guy who could have just jumped out of that damn hole, but he wasn’t, and he was going to have to live with that.

  “Kyle, are you okay?” Mark rolled over and knelt next to Kyle, who looked pale.

  “I’m bleeding,” Kyle said, this time not pretending to be all right.

  “Let me see your wound.” Kyle lifted his shirt and Mark could see the place where he’d been pierced.

  “It doesn’t look deep. That’s good, but we do need to get this cleaned out. Water,” he held out his hand and Alice got him a bottle of water. He poured it over Kyle’s cut and then folded Alice’s shirt neatly and pressed it over the wound. “You’re going to need stitches for sure, buddy, but it can wait until we get back to camp. Can you walk?”

  “I can walk,” Kyle said.

  “Good man.” Mark helped him to his feet. Kyle wasn’t in any danger of bleeding out. Not as long as they went straight home. It was an even path and a steady walk back to the lodge. They didn’t have rough terrain to cross or a rocky path.

  “What about this?” Alice jerked her head toward the trap they’d fallen into. “What do we do about this?”

  “We leave it,” Mark said. “Whoever made it will come back and see that their trap didn’t work. Fuck them.” He spit on the ground.

  “You don’t think it was the watcher, do you?” Alice asked.

  “I don’t think there would have been any point in a watcher making a trap like that.”

  “Cannibals,” Kyle said helpfully.

  “Probably just someone who wants to catch zombies. I’d bet anything there’s a house further up past that. Someone just wants to protect their space.”

  “So much for finding what we came for,” Alice said.

  “We learned there are other survivors,” Mark pointed out. “And that counts for something. It’s not a lot, but it’s something we didn’t really know before.”

  “We don’t know for certain,” Kyle said, but they did. They knew. A watcher wouldn’t have made a trap like that. It was too unlikely and didn’t make any sense. The question now became whether the other survivors were trying to catch humans or zombies with their traps.

  Who were these other humans?

  Where were they?

  And were they going to cause trouble for Mark, Alice, Kyle, and Torrance?

  “I don’t think we should leave it,” Alice said slowly. “Because it’s one thing to escape. It’s another for the person who made the trap to know we escaped.”

  “She’s right,” Kyle agreed, and Mark should his head. He didn’t want them to be right. He didn’t want to take the time to reset the trap, but he also didn’t want to let the person who created it to think they’d won. “We need to be as invisible as possible, Mark. You should know that better than anybody.”

  “I’ll help you,” Alice said, and together, they got the trap doors closed and the tripwire reset. It only took a few minutes. When they were finished, they kicked dirt and brush over the dirt to cover their tracks. Mark was satisfied with the job they’d done covering up. No one would know they had fallen into the trap. No one would know they had escaped, that they’d beaten the person who made it.

  Mark gathered up the rest of their supplies and shoved them in the backpack. They didn’t leave the plastic bottle pieces or the knife behind. They took
everything, and then they started walking through the woods in the direction of the lodge.

  No one needed to voice that they had given up looking for the watcher. What mattered most was getting Kyle back so he could get his stitches and lay down for awhile. Mark hated knowing the fucking creature was still out there, but his team came first.

  His family came first.

  That’s what they were now. They were family, and they were in this together. Even Torrance, with her quirky attitude and crazy hair, was part of their family now. She had shown over and over that she could pull her own weight. Yeah, she was injured, but she wasn’t going to let that hold her back. Mark would bet anything that when they got back to the lodge, they would find she had done something, made some gesture, to prove to them she was worth keeping around.

  He didn’t blame her.

  Nobody wanted to be viewed as the weak link. No one wanted to think the group didn’t need them, of all people, around. It was a brutal world and one where anything could happen. No one wanted to be the person who wasn’t pulling their own weight.

  They made their way slowly back to the lodge. While walking in the morning had been boring, the journey back seemed even worse. Mark knew Kyle was hurting and in pain. He couldn’t do anything about that right now. All he could do was keep them moving, keep them heading toward the lodge.

  They had to get back there.

  With any luck, they’d be back long before Torrance had expected them, and there would be plenty of time to chop some wood or work on securing the parameter of the lodge before nightfall. None of them liked to burn candles or use flashlights in the dark. Although they sat up talking sometimes, for the most part, the group went to bed at nightfall.

  And they were always, always indoors before nightfall. While Mark had no problem walking around outside in the light, he wasn’t about to risk being attacked by zombies in the dark. That was one mess he did not need and was not interested in. No thank you.