How to Start Living (in the Zombie Apocalypse)

by T. L. Walker

  Why are they so concerned with me getting my shit together or being lucid when it’s all these other people who should worry about staying in one piece? The whole damn time she was here, all I could do was concentrate on when she would leave again. She smelled more like food than the plate of baked beans and canned carrots Jia left for me.

  I don’t want to hurt Mrs. Downing, but I have to assume that I will. So yeah, Charlie, if you ever read this...I’m already rethinking the whole thing.

  *******

  A sort of paranoia that I’ve never known before has gripped me. I almost tore every page of this notebook into shreds a few minutes ago, because what if someone discovers it before I can even do the damage I’m supposed to do? Instead I hid it for a while and focused on finding a way out of this room. Not that that mattered or changed anything – Dominic came back and told me that he’d be standing guard at my door this evening. Most of my second day here is gone, and I don’t even know how it happened. All I know is that the kid kept his distance and a military regulation knife in his hand the whole time he talked to me.

  I asked him how he knew it would happen that night. Apparently Jia came to visit and found me sleeping, so she stormed off to make the nurse come check on me. Dominic didn’t have to explain that somehow, some way, Mrs. Downing had staved Jia off.

  I’m more worried about the fact that I don’t remember falling asleep. I don’t remember waking up. All I know is this fire in my head, this feeling that my heart is shrinking in on itself.

  And when I blink my eyes, sometimes I see nothing but shades of red and black.

  But at least it’s still just sometimes.

  *******

  Dominic has been outside the door for a while. He’s left it open. I hope he’s prepared, because I’m not. I’ve lost so much of myself, and I know there’s no way to get any of it back. I’m going to die. I’m going to turn. Or maybe it happens at the same time, when you’ve been infected like this. I wonder if Mrs. Downing knows. I wonder if any good can come of this. I don’t care about being a martyr or a sacrifice, I just want to know that my friends are safe. I couldn’t keep Cheryl safe, couldn’t keep Joey safe, couldn’t even keep myself safe.

  But Charlie can do anything. I both love and hate her for that. So if you find what I’ve written here, if you run into a woman named Charlie, make sure she knows how it happens. And know that if anyone can protect you, she can. Just don’t assume that she’ll agree to do so.

  I won’t be able to write again. The door is open. Night has fallen. It won’t be long.

  Chapter 12

  Fight

  There could be more than one of them.

  Bullshit. You only heard one radio.

  Holden had long since sat down, still on alert but no longer as interested in things beyond the gate as he was in me. I knew that I shouldn’t abandon my post, tried to tell myself that maybe Lauren and Mike had witnessed something and that she would be back soon.

  In the end, my impatience got the better of me. I waited as long as I could, waited until the sky went from gray to pale pink, and finally decided that enough was enough. I ran back to the office building, Holden easily keeping pace by my side. Virginia was guarding the door now, her expression changing from merely watchful to concerned as she saw me approach. She stood and walked toward me, holding out her arm until I was forced to a stop."What happened?" Her voice was worried yet stern in a way that made me more angry than anything else.

  "I don’t know. I don’t know. I think they must have only had one person watching the gate. Holden, he heard something, and then I did too – a radio, they were calling for help at the school. Whoever was there ran off. I waited but didn’t see or hear anything else, and maybe I should have waited even though no one came to get me, but we need to get moving.Even if there’s something else going on at the school, what matters is that we’re not their first priority right now."

  "What about Lauren and Mike?" she snapped.

  "When did they leave?"

  "Hours ago; it couldn’t have been long after Richard came back. He had me take Daniel’s place here so that Mabel wouldn’t be alone."

  I tried to do the math in my head."If they were able to take an almost straight route to the school, it was a couple of miles at most. A little over an hour, less if they didn’t have any problems." More if they did. I shook my head, refusing to waste time on bullshit worries like that right now.

  "Then we have to hope thatLauren is on her way back. But I’ll need to take Daniel with me. And Richard, which means you’re left guarding Bobby."

  "No. Richard needs to stay. I’ll go. Ethan can watch the door. We’ll have to hope no one shows up at the front gate."

  Or in the back pen.

  I kept that thought to myself, too.

  "If you insist on going, thenI think you and I can handle this ourselves," Virginia said pointedly.

  "You know I respect you, but you and I can’t do this on our own. We need a third person. We need more than that, really, but three will have to do."

  "And Mike? Do you think he’ll want to come back here and just leave us to it? Four’s better than three, if you want to play it that way. Or he can be the third person."

  "Much as I hate to do it, I’ll give him the choice of joining us or coming back to the zoo. But we..." I paused and bit down hard on my lip. I couldn’t bring myself to say it, couldn’t bring myself to point out that we had no idea what had happened or that either Mike or Lauren were safe. I needed Daniel, which means I had to assume that Lauren was safe and on her way back to the zoo.

  Otherwise I was a monster who was putting Mabel’s only remaining parent in danger.

  "I don’t like this," Virginia grumbled.

  "Neither do I," I admitted. But I didn’t like letting Luke go either, and that happened anyway.

  If anything this was a reminder of how soft Virginia, Ethan, and Richard were. Would she even be able to handle herself once she was outside the safety of the zoo?

  Virginia’s voice brought me back to the present."Charlie? Charlie, I thought you said we needed to get moving."

  "Yeah. Yes. We need weapons. Guns. Knives. My bat, if it’s still tucked away somewhere."

  "I’ll get Ethan. You go take your minute with Bobby, and then it’s on you to convince Daniel to come with us."

  "He’ll come. In the end this is all about protecting this place, protecting our people. And his daughter is one of our people." Do you hear the words coming out of your mouth right now, Charlie? Jesus, you sound like Luke. "But hey, thanks for the last-minute chance to talk to the kid."

  "If you think I don’t know sarcasm when I hear it, you’re wrong. But I need to find Ethan, you need to warn Richard, and we need to find out if Bobby knows why their guards would be called back to the school."

  "Fine." I opened the door, but before I could step inside Virginia cupped a hand over my shoulder.

  "Charlie, don’t undo what Richard and I have done."

  "What’s that supposed to mean?" I asked, wondering if I should be merely annoyed or outright angry.

  "Be nice," she insisted.

  "I’ll try my best. Go find Ethan and gather up as many weapons as you can carry." I turned and let the door slam behind me before she could give me any more unsolicited advice.

  I found Richard sitting in a chair in the room where he’d once held Luke captive, only now it was Bobby in the cage."We’re moving," I told him, barely glancing at Bobby.

  "What do you mean?"

  "I mean that I was at the gate and whoever was watching it got a call on their radio and ran off, so some of us are going to see what’s happening at the school."

  I heard Bobby scoff."You have no idea what you’re dealing with."

  I stepped forward, practically pressing myself against the bars of his cage."Oh, I think Jia is the one who has no idea what she’s dealing with. Luke – the man she took? He was bitten quite a while ago. We tried to fix it, but we couldn’t. And yeah,
she left someone guarding our gate, but he’s gone – got an emergency call on his radio and ran back to headquarters. My guess is that anyone else watching this place got the same call...and yet...you’re still here. Why do you think that is?"

  He tried to shrug me off."Doesn’t matter. Jia wouldn’t have left me here if she thought I wasn’t safe. You want to make the first move? Hurt me, and she’ll do ten times worse to you."

  "I can handle Jia."I forced a laugh."But can she handle a zed in her wannabe safe zone? After all, what else could cause her to recall her guards?"

  "Charlie." Richard’s tone was one of warning, but I refused to heed it. Instead, I sat down in front of the cage and stared at Bobby.

  "Your friends who were watching this zoo are gone. Jia took the wrong person captive. Luke was infected, and now your people are suffering. Even if Jia herself survives this, we know that we have sympathizers in your ranks. You hadmore people – but you don’t anymore."I was mostly playing a guessing game now, and the worried look that crossed Bobby’s face probably made me feel better than it should have."Richard, can you go talk to Virginia? We’re going to need you to...play a different role, for a little while. Hopefully not too long."

  He hesitated, but I stared him down, hoping that he could see how important this was, that I wasn’t just trying to trick him into leaving the room – although of course part of my goal was ending up alone with Bobby."I won’t be far behind you," I finally promised, and with a frustrated grunt he stood and left us.

  "What, he’s gone so now you’re going to torture me for information?" Bobby’s expression was once again vacant, as if he wasn’t at all concerned about his fate.

  I laughed."Why would I need to torture you? We’ve already gained the upper hand, kid. No, I’ve come here to tell you that we’ll be bringing you back to the school. That way you can see firsthand what happened to your fellow child soldiers."

  "Child soldiers?"he repeated, his eyes glinting."Fuck off. You know nothing about us."

  "Oh, I don’t know much, you’re right about that. But I know enough. And I know you’re coming with us."

  The truth was, it wasn’t safe, leaving him here. Unless by some slim chance Lauren returned before Virginia, Daniel, and I left, Richard would need to watch Mabel, which meant leaving Bobby alone. I wasn’t ready to do that, and even if I was, I knew that this kid needed to witness Jia’s downfall – that if he didn’t see it firsthand, he probably wouldn’t believe that it had happened.

  And I didn’t want Bobby to still be here at the zoo if for some reason I didn’t return. That was always a possibility – my not returning – and it was one that I accepted wholeheartedly. My people had been very clear that they didn’t expect me to protect them; I still felt like I should do so, but I had to imagine that Luke was gone, had to remind myself that if I came back to this place it wouldn’t be a permanent thing. Not anymore.

  Maybe I’d been lying to myself from the start, believing that we could stay anywhere for more than a temporary amount of time.

  It was probably a good thing that Virginia came in to fetch me just then."Let’s wrap this up and be on our way,"she said."He can be left alone for a little while."

  Now came the hard part. I turned my back on Bobby and followed Virginia back to the office, where everyone – even Mabel – was gathered. They were already separating what weapons we would carry with us, but when I cleared my throat everyone turned to look at me expectantly.

  "We’re bringing the kid with us. We don’t have enough people staying back here to watch him, at least not until Lauren returns, and that could be minutes...or hours. And he should witness this, anyway. Otherwise he might never believe that Jia could fail."

  I was surprised when both Richard and Virginia nodded their assent. Daniel looked half-panicked by the idea, but the two people who had spent the most time with our"hostage" knew why it needed to be this way. Maybe they were even about to suggest it themselves.

  "My bat?"I finally asked. Ethan handed it to me, and as he did so he looked me in the eye and wished me good luck."Thanks," I said, smiling despite myself, smiling because I could see that he believed in me – in us."While I’m gone, keep Holden close, okay? Take care of him for me."Ethan nodded; it was hard to resist the urge to reach out and take his hand; instead I smiled again before bending to tuck knives into each of my boots. I then grabbed the first belt I could find – it was one of my father’s that we’d brought from the farm, all soft, tooled leather that was meant more for show than anything. I had to poke around for another knife, the smallest one we had left, and punch a hole through the belt strap several inches from where the last one had been."Shit," I mumbled when I tried to put it on. It took two more tries to get it perfect, at which point I added a gun to each hip. A pistol on the left and a revolver on the right. Nothing special, but it was what I could carry if I wanted to move fast.

  Daniel chose a shotgun and added a couple of sheathed knives to the belt that was already barely holding up his pants, then picked up a golf club we’d snagged from a sporting goods store when we were still at the farm. Virginia had her rifle and a belt with a pistol and a knife, as well as one of the zoo’s original homemade maces. While I forced myself to zip myself up into a leather jacket, Daniel insisted that he would be fine in jeans and a t-shirt. Virginia was somewhere between us, wearing horribly dirty khaki pants and a long-sleeved running shirt with a high collar. They knew that I wasn’t happy, that I would prefer us to suffer a bit on the trip to the school if it meant staving off zed teeth and nails along the way – and once we’re there – but there wasn’t really any time to argue, especially considering how much it bothered me that I couldn’t remember how much Jia and her people had taken from us, couldn’t remember how much we were leaving behind. Not enough, I mused, and it took everything in my power to tear my eyes away from Mabel.

  Lauren would be back, I had to believe that, and she had weapons, too.

  We were lucky that the zoo had had security guards. There was a pair of handcuffs, old but never used, for Bobby, and I cut a strip off one of our thick blankets so that I could blind him. Wide enough to cover his ears, as well, and hopefully muffle out whatever sounds the rest of us could hear.

  "He knows where he’s going," Daniel reminded me. It was obvious that he was forcing himself to say as much.

  "I want him seeing and hearing as little as possible until we get there. I want to remove this blindfold and show him the fall of hissanctuary, because I know he imagined the fall of ours."

  "It’s already fallen," Daniel replied sadly.

  All I could say was,"I know."

  I watched him kiss Mabel goodbye, watched him hug her tight in a way that I couldn’t remember my father ever hugging me. And then we left her with Richard and Ethan and went to gather Bobby. He didn’t even bother trying to fight us, and I wasn’t sure if the smirk on his face was forced or if he really believed we couldn’t beat his people, couldn’t conquer the school, couldn’t oust Jia. It didn’t really matter. Even if he was right – somehow, some way – we needed this last stand. We couldn’t survive in this zoo if we were forced to give and give and give while we received little or nothing in return.

  Bobby was handcuffed before we even led him outside, and blindfolded as soon as Ethan locked the zoo’s gate behind us. Virginia clutched her son’s hands through the bars; not a word passed between them, but I knew it was their goodbye. Is it just in case, or does she know she won’t come back? And then we led our captive away from the zoo, my knuckles white as they gripped the thick rope we’d wrapped around his waist. He had to be my responsibility.

  We stalked through the woods, the sun already pouring through the canopy, dappling the path in front of us as we moved around the zoo, cut through the back end of the park, and made our way up the river toward downtown. We veered to the west not long before we reached that more popular area, though strangely enough, we didn’t encounter any zeds. Not long after we left the zoo I could hear dista
nt popping sounds; not constant, but enough that when Daniel, Virginia, and I shared a glance, it was obvious that we all knew what they were.

  It seemed like hours had passed before we finally hit a point where the woods ended and we were forced to make our way through a block of what were once high-end apartments. A large portion of one of the buildings was nothing more than a burnt husk, and I couldn’t help but eye the windows of the other buildings as we half-walked, half-jogged through the back end of the complex’s parking lot. Hands cuffed behind his back and eyes covered with a blindfold, Bobby had trouble keeping up with us even with me dragging him along, but I barely slowed down as I kept an eye on our surroundings. Most of the lower apartment windows were shattered, and there was no movement to be seen.

  Finally we were back in a stand of trees, struggling up a hill through the underbrush before bursting out into the parking lot of a former café. We snuck between it and its old brick building of a neighbor, following the road another quarter of a mile north.

  All the while we heard the telltale sounds of a battle going on somewhere nearby, which was probably the only reason that the few zeds I caught sight of were far away and not paying us any mind. We took another left through the parking lot of a much taller apartment building, shards of glass crunching under our feet. I motioned for the others to slow, pointed to my eyes, then at the building. If there were any guards outside the school’s fences, this would be a perfect place...assuming that Jia took it over.

  Even knowing so little about her, I had to assume that she’d done so.

  Despite taking our time to curve around the apparently deserted building, we soon reached the edge of its property. I crouched down in the brush that separated it from the school fence by a couple dozen yards, dragging Bobby to his knees with me. Virginia and Daniel followed my lead; this brush was the only shelter we had as we gazed down a small hill at Jia’s once seemingly impregnable fences.

  Only now, chaos rained.