by Sam Sisavath
The whole time, Kate stood behind him with his baseball bat, one eye on the streets and the other on the covered windows of the Wallbys and Blockbuster stores in front of them. They had plenty of sunlight and, though she knew it wasn’t the case, the hours felt as if they were draining away at a rapid and unnatural pace.
“How are those guns holding up?” she asked.
“They’re holding, they’re holding,” he grunted back.
He kept at the bars, sweating profusely. Once he’d finally pried the first bar to one side, he went to work on the second, bending it to the other side until he had a big enough hole to fit his thin and lanky frame through. They were lucky the bars only ran up and down the window and not across, too. The idea was to not damage them in the process, so they could be bent back in place later on.
He finally stood back and gave the hole he had created a once-over. It looked too small, even for him.
“Are you sure you can get through that?” she asked. “Maybe if we cover you in butter first…”
He gave her a smirk, then began loosening up. “I’ve crawled through smaller spaces than this.”
“Why?”
“What?”
“Why did you have to crawl through smaller spaces than this?”
“You know, stuff,” he said, as if she should understand.
He’s fourteen. Of course he’s crawled through places smaller than this.
Luke smashed the window behind the bars with the tire iron and knocked the glass shards away from the frame. He used his hands to pick out small pieces that couldn’t be dislodged and flicked them away.
“You sure it’s safe?” she asked.
“Mostly. I’ll be careful.”
“You’ve done this before, right? Crawled through a window?”
“Nope.”
Crouching down in front of the window, he inserted himself through the bent bars and slithered like a snake through the hole, going in headfirst. She was afraid he might cut himself on some leftover piece of glass and dreaded the sound of him screaming.
Any second now, any second now…
Amazingly, he was halfway through in no time, his head pushing the curtain aside, and grabbing at something inside the pawnshop. With a grunt, he pulled himself all the way in and fell down on the pawnshop floor with a loud thump.
I guess he really has done this before.
“Bat,” he called.
She quickly slipped the bat through the burglar bars. He stood up on the other side and grabbed at the bat.
“I’ll be back in a few,” he said and disappeared from the window.
She picked up the tire iron and went back to watching the parking lot. She heard him rummaging inside the pawnshop behind her, and it took him ten minutes to find what he needed to find. She called his name every minute to make sure he was still alive. She thought he might get annoyed eventually, but he didn’t…or at least, he didn’t tell her to stop. He needed the reassurances that she was still out there, apparently.
Finally, he found a key in one of the drawers behind the counter. He quickly opened the front door and used the key to open the security gate over the door. He stepped aside and Kate hurried in, anxious to finally be indoors and hidden from prying eyes.
The store smelled of old things, but she quickly got used to it while going through the shelves. She busied herself while Luke went outside and bent the bars back into their old shape. Or as close to it as he could get them. He did a mostly good job, and she hoped the creatures weren’t too keen on details. Their lives would depend on it.
He hurried back inside and locked the security gate. Then he snapped all three locks on the door into place one after another. He walked over to the window and stared at the broken glass.
“How does it look?” she asked.
“I guess if we keep the curtain closed somehow…”
“Nail it to the wall?”
“That could work. Or tape it. You find something we can use for that?”
“I saw some duct tape. And these.”
She walked over with a machete and a curved sword, both items with price tags still dangling from their scabbards. They were the most lethal-looking bladed weapons she could find, and just holding them made her weary. The only blades she had ever wielded in her life were kitchen knives. And these looked dangerous, which was exactly what they needed.
Luke looked at the sword and grinned from ear to ear. “I call the Samurai sword.”
“I never would have guessed.”
He took the sword and slid it out of its scabbard. It made a sharp noise and Kate swore it might have hissed as the steel came in contact with air. He took a few steps and made practice slashes with the bladed weapon. She winced, reminding herself that he was just a boy, playing with sharp objects. She chastised herself for not leaving it on the shelf in the first place.
“Be careful,” she said.
“Yes, Mom,” he said between slashes against the air.
She rolled her eyes, but smiled anyway.
CHAPTER 12
CARLY
CARLY HEARD THE police siren long before she actually saw the car driving up Richmond Avenue. She watched it slow down in order to weave past a small pileup on the street below her. She glimpsed two people in the front—they had the bulk and shoulders of men—and there were big bundles in the back seats. She tried to zoom in with the binoculars, but by the time she got the damn thing working right, the car was already gone.
They drove pass the ESL Language Center building that she was lying on top of and kept going. She briefly considered standing up and trying to flag the car down, but she was still thinking about it when the car vanished into the distance, and she eventually lost sight of its red taillights.
She shoved the binoculars into the backpack and left the rooftop, where she had been perched for the last few hours eating a sandwich and drinking a can of Diet Coke, while scanning the horizon for survivors. Back inside, she made sure to lock the rooftop door behind her. The door was made of steel, so it closed with a solid and comforting wham! She turned the tumbler, then tested the door. She had to be sure. It wasn’t just her life at stake, and she had learned last night that they couldn’t break down doors if you locked them. Well, they could if they kept at it long enough—she had seen that, too—but they weren’t going to get through a steel door.
Hopefully.
The ESL Language Center building had four floors, and she jogged down to the fourth, where Vera and Ted were holed up. The three of them had been here since last night, when everything went to hell as Carly and Vera came out of the store with a bag full of coloring books. It was Ted who saved them, pulling them out of the streets when he didn’t have to, with chaos and people dying all around them. Carly had never believed in the whole Good Samaritan thing, but Ted had changed her mind that night.
Vera was where Carly left her, sitting near one of the windows drawing in her coloring book. At seven, the girl reminded Carly of their mother, including her blonde hair and blue eyes, while Carly got stuck with their father’s ginger traits and brown eyes. They were both thin girls, but that wasn’t really a choice. Mom’s disability social security checks paid for the rent and kept the lights on, but not much else. Carly had to supply the rest.
Don’t need the lights on now, Mom.
Ted couldn’t be more different from them. He was twenty-five, with short brown hair that complimented his eyes. He was also big. She remembered thinking, He’s a giant, when he grabbed her arm and dragged her into the building. There was real terror when she saw him looming over her for the first time, but then she saw his eyes and she knew he wasn’t going to hurt them. She hadn’t known how she knew, she just did.
“I saw a police car,” Ted said as she came out of the stairwell. He was excited and managed to spill some of his Mountain Dew when he looked up. “I couldn’t tell if they were cops from the window. Did you see them?”
“I couldn’t tell if they were wearing uniforms,”
she said.
“Did they see you?”
“No.”
She saw the disappointment on his face. Ted was easy to read, mostly because he didn’t try to hide his emotions. Or didn’t know how to.
“I thought about trying to wave them down,” she added, “but we don’t know who they are, and I don’t want to risk it in case they weren’t, you know, like you.”
Ted flushed a bit. “That’s probably smart. At least now we know there are other people out there. I was starting to think it’s just us.”
Carly nodded. There was something reassuring about knowing that others had survived last night, too. When she woke up this morning and saw nothing, just an empty street and an equally empty city around her, she felt a kind of depression she didn’t think was possible.
Ted was already playing with his portable radio again. “Anything?” she asked.
“Not yet.”
“You think you’ll eventually get something?”
“Probably not.”
“But that’s not going to stop you from trying, huh?”
“I’m stubborn that way, I guess.”
“Or maybe you’re just optimistic,” she smiled.
“What’s that?”
“Optimistic?”
“Uh huh.”
“It means you think positively. You know, if there’s a glass of water that’s only half full, you think, ‘Hey, it’s half full!’ While others would think, ‘Damn, it’s half empty.’ They call that being optimistic.”
“Oh. I guess I am, then.”
“Keep trying.”
He nodded, but she could tell he was already thinking about something else. He tended to drift off like that.
She walked over and sat down next to Vera. She was coloring in a picture of Dora the Explorer, the character on her favorite TV show. Carly wasn’t sure what she would tell Vera when she eventually started asking questions about last night. Vera had seen it begin—the killings, the screaming, the debilitating fear as they fled down the street—but Carly hid everything from her after Ted rescued them. Or hid as much as she could, anyway. She couldn’t shut out the screaming no matter how hard she tried.
To her surprise, Vera hadn’t asked about it when they woke up this morning. Maybe she just knew, or maybe she didn’t know how to ask. Vera could be enigmatic like that sometimes.
“How’s it hanging?” Carly asked, ruffling the girl’s hair.
The girl didn’t look up from her coloring book. “It’s hanging.”
“We’ll get you some more coloring books later. Maybe tomorrow Ted and I will try to find some in the CVS store across the street.”
“Cool,” the girl said.
“You eaten yet?”
Vera picked up a small bag of peanuts that Ted had procured from one of the vending machines in the lobby. There were also soda cans and bottled water nearby. If nothing else, they had plenty of food and drinks. Eventually she would have to find something less sugary for Vera. And toothbrushes. She hadn’t brushed her teeth since yesterday morning, and Carly could feel it along every inch of her mouth.
She leaned against the window and took some of Vera’s peanuts. They crunched loudly in her mouth. Her thoughts drifted back to her mother, who was probably dead or turned into one of those things, hiding in some building with covered windows like the ones around them. Mom did the best she could. All three of them did. A part of Carly felt guilty that she wasn’t more affected by the idea of her mother no longer being with them.
Some daughter you turned out to be…
She looked back at Vera and found it easy to forget about her guilt. Vera had always been her responsibility, even before last night. It was just more obvious now.
“Your hair’s growing long,” Carly said. “We should cut it.”
“No,” Vera said, her nose firmly planted in her coloring books.
“A little.”
“No.”
“A smidgeon?”
“Maybe.”
Carly smiled. She added scissors to her list.
Until then, she looked around their sanctuary. The fourth floor was one big classroom, with old chair/desk combos that looked like they had been raided from one of those old-timey schools from the ‘50s or ‘60s. There was a chalkboard on the far wall and bulletin boards covered with citizenship information and brochures about further English studying and offers of private tutoring in English, Vietnamese, Spanish, and a dozen other languages.
Ted walked nosily over and sat down across from her and Vera. His face was slightly contorted.
“What’s up?” she asked, though she already knew.
“Should we follow them?” he said hesitantly. “The cop car, I mean? I know you said we can’t be sure if we can trust them, but we’re going to have to trust someone sooner or later, don’t we? It can’t just be the three of us, can it?”
“Why not? It’s worked out so far.”
“So far, yeah.” He struggled for the right words. “But for how long, though?”
“Even if we did go looking for them, we wouldn’t know where to look. I can’t hear the siren anymore. Can you?”
“No. But where were they headed the last time you saw them?”
“Down Richmond.”
“Did you see them turn?”
“They kept going down Richmond until I couldn’t see their lights anymore.”
“So maybe they stopped somewhere up the road.” He paused, thought about it further, then shrugged. “Maybe we’ll get lucky, I don’t know. I think we’re due some luck, don’t you?”
“We got our luck,” she said. “We found you.”
He flushed again. She smiled. He was cute when he did that.
Gentle giant.
“Do you really want to find them?” she asked.
“I don’t know. I’m fine with just the three of us, but what’s that saying? About numbers?”
“Strength in numbers.”
“Yeah. If they are cops, then they might have guns. Guys who know how to use guns would be a really big help in this situation, don’t you think?”
“You have a gun and you know how to use it.”
“Yeah, but there’s just me, and I only have six bullets in this one gun. And come on, it’s not like I’m really trained to shoot. They had me do a one-day course before I got this job. I think I shot for, like, thirty minutes before they handed me some papers. I’m not a pro or anything.”
“Maybe you’re right,” she said. “Maybe we should go look for them.”
“Couldn’t hurt to try. If we don’t find them…” He glanced at his watch. “We have plenty of time to make it back here before nightfall.”
She looked over at Vera. “Hey, what about you? You get a vote, too.”
Vera shrugged, then went back to coloring in Dora’s eyes with brown crayon.
Ted said, “I don’t know what that means.”
“That means she’s game if we are.”
“Oh. You got all that from a shrug?”
“Didn’t you?”
*
Ted had a car in the parking lot behind the ESL building. It was an old, beat-up Camry sedan, with torn seats, and you had to pull on the front passenger door to get it to open because, he told her, of an accident a few years ago. After Carly failed to open it the first couple of tries, Ted opened it for her with barely any effort. Vera, already in the back seat of the Camry, giggled.
“Be quiet, you,” Carly snapped playfully at her. “Put on your seatbelt.”
“No one can get it open,” Ted said, smiling at her.
The Camry made a strange clinking noise as Ted drove, but Carly held off asking about it. Besides, the car seemed to be moving just fine.
They followed the police car’s trail, which wasn’t hard since it had gone straight up Richmond Avenue, one of the longer and more commercialized streets in Houston.
She glanced at her watch. 2:10 p.m.
It was late November, so it tended to get dar
k faster now than any other month of the year. Did the creatures know that? Maybe. She had seen the way they moved, attacked, and dragged people off the streets. They didn’t killed everyone right away—they took people, kicking and screaming and fighting. She didn’t want to think where, or why. It was terrible enough just to see it all play out in front of her, as she sat in the darkness of the ESL building, unable to look away and too afraid to move or speak or even breathe at times.
“If we don’t find them by three-thirty, we need to start heading back,” she said.
Ted nodded. “Okay.”
He drove with two hands on the steering wheel, with a look of total concentration that reminded her of student drivers. They were barely doing thirty-five, not because Ted was afraid of hitting cars in the streets. It was how Ted normally drove—slow and steady. She found it oddly endearing.
Richmond Avenue seemed to go on forever, crossing paths with the city’s major roads and highways. Commercial buildings passed by in an endless stream of banners and signs and parking lots. Apartments, townhomes, and office buildings.
By the time they passed Hazard Street, they were already thirty minutes into the drive, and she started counting down the time in her head before they had to turn back.
Ted, who had been quiet for most of the drive, finally said, “Look at the windows.”
“I see them,” she said.
She had seen the creatures covering up the windows across the street from the ESL building last night. It was the sunlight. They scurried off the streets when morning came, like cockroaches looking for cover. She knew then they could be safe in the daylight, because those things feared it. A covered window was a sign there were creatures inside.
“They’re everywhere,” Ted said. “How is that possible?”
“The people they attacked,” she said. “They infect them somehow. The victims don’t die, Ted, they turn.”
“Yeah, but there are so many now…”
“How many people are in Houston?”
“Two million, one hundred thousand, and forty-five hundred at last count,” Ted said without hesitation. “But that was back in 2011. There might have been more since.”
