The First 400 Days (Book 1): We Are What Remain

by Taja Kartio

  Huh. Maybe another deer had caught their attention.

  I followed their lumbering to see a large number of them banging the front window of the house two doors down.

  Are you... No fucking way.

  That house had homed Scott and Hollie for the last couple months and what do you know, the little bitch herself was getting into high-shit trouble again. I could see her in the upstairs window, staring down at the monsters on the ground below. Clearly terrified. More Infected were closing in on the house by the second. Some of them may have just been following the lead of the others, but Hollie nearly had the entire cul-de-sac trying to smash their way inside.Then something clicked and before I really understood what I was doing, I had my metal baseball bat and I was starting to slowly open the back door that led to the patio behind the house.

  I couldn't draw attention to myself, not too much at least. It was probably impossible to go completely unnoticed with so many of them, and I really hoped the back door of Hollie's house was unlocked. I thought about that just as I was crossing past the house next door, what if it wasn't unlocked? Hollie didn't know I was coming for her. She was all the way on the upper level and I wasn't going to start pounding away at the glass. I would just sound like the rest of the Infected to her, and all I would be doing would be attracting them towards me.

  Despite the costs, I ended up tiptoeing to their back door anyway. I made no eye contact with any Infected, thanking nobody in particular that there weren't any Infected in the backyard and hoped that all the ones in the front of the house were too distracted to notice me.

  And thankfully, the back door was unlocked. I almost made a face. It was so lucky and fortuitous that I felt like I should be that person in the theater who moans and groans because of how cinematically fortunate it was. You would think in an apocalypse, all doors and windows would be sealed with a layer of concrete and boarded up with all the wood of every tree in a ten block radius.

  I slipped inside and shut the door behind me, locking it. The house was nearly the same setup as the one I had been in and it wasn't difficult to find the stairs leading up to the top levels.

  "Hollie?" I called softly, "Hollie, where are you?"

  "Dani?" A small voice, followed by a head popped out of one of the bedroom doorways, "Wha... What are you doing?"

  I waved my hand toward me urgently, "Come on! Let's get out of here!"

  With her current situation, I may have slapped her if she even attempted to argue. I was still surprised when she didn't though. She followed me downstairs and to the back patio door without question. No Infected as far as I could tell, not yet.

  "Okay, we do this quick and as quietly as possible. Don't look up front where they all are, just follow me. If there's any Infected, let me handle it. You go for the back door of the place I've been staying in."

  Hollie nodded, her wide eyes never faulting for a second, "I just got one question."

  Of course she did, "Ya?"

  "After everything I've done, why are you helping me?"

  Actually, that was a fantastic question. Why was I helping her? I didn't like her. In fact, one could say I almost hated her. Yet here I was, getting her sorry ass out of harm's way, "I guess I'm just the world's biggest fucking idiot."

  Before she could reply to that, glass shattered. The Infected must have broken through the front living room windows.

  "That's our cue!" I opened the back door and closed it behind Hollie quickly. The backyard was still relatively clear but a few wandering Infected roamed at the sight of us. Easy enough to avoid and our path was thankfully clear enough to reach our destination unharmed.

  "Now what?"

  "Upstairs," I said after shutting the door behind her. She followed close behind me, "We should be fine if it's just one or two that are hanging out by the back door. Most of them are piling into your place so as long as we don't draw any more attention to ourselves we should be-" I stopped at the sight of the front door. Wide open. A small figure was standing two steps outside with his teddy bear clutched close to his chest, "Hayden! What are you doing?"

  He turned back quickly and the sight of me, he quickly ran back inside and headed straight for my waist. Hollie shut the door.

  "I couldn't find you!" Hayden whimpered into my sweatshirt, "I thought you left me!"

  I couldn't have been missing for more than ten minutes, and he was clocked out when I went downstairs after waking up, "Of course not!"

  "We have company thanks to him." Hollie strutted back a step just as a hand slapped the glass from the outside.

  "Oh, you're the last one to talk," I muttered, watching more bodies collide into the other side of the door. I wrapped my mind around the events leading up to this moment and I could completely confirm I probably would have been that person in the theater to walk out and leave. It was just horrendous, my stupidity, and Hollies of course. I'm not going to put all the blame on my shoulders. She was the one who put everybody in this situation in the first place after all.

  Hollie turned, eyeing the stairs to the second level, "So are we going to go hide upstairs like you suggested?"

  My mind was blank on any next course of action. The Infected all knew we were in here now and it wasn't the one or two Infected I knew would probably be investigating the house, no, it was a horde of them and they would break in eventually, more sooner than later actually. I really didn't want to resort to holding up somewhere in the house and hoping my brothers came soon but we had nowhere else to go, not anywhere we could be found so easily. I was sure we could have headed for one of the neighbor's houses but getting there without being seen and then just end up back in the same situation we were in right now was inevitable.

  A crash from behind us, the air is rent by the sound of breaking glass. My heart accelerates and I'm the first to catch sight of the culprits that have broken through the back door. There were only two but one actually had a large rock in it's hands. I almost paused at that. Infected don't use anything other than their own two hands? This one used the rock as a tool, a very effective way to break inside the house.

  I pushed Hayden back into Hollie behind me and stepped forward with the baseball bat raised above my head. The first Infected had fallen through the shattered door and was slowly rising to its feet. I swung the bat downwards, lodging a strike into the back of its skull. The second Infected received the same blow to its jaw. It wasn't enough to kill it, but enough for me land another hit after it had fallen to the ground. I gave the Infected a few short seconds but when they made no movement, I set my bat on the counter and turned my attention to the broken door.

  "We need to try and block this up somehow."

  "I don't think we have time for that!" Hollie pointed down the hallway where Infected had begun piling in from the front door. Through the kitchen, I could see the curtain hanging over the living room window wave wildly with the shadows of Infected arms. When the hell did they break through?

  Shit. We didn't have any other choice. We had to leave. Now.

  On the tabletop, were the couple of backpacks and duffel bag of medicine and pharmaceuticals that I was thanking myself silently for packing up earlier.

  I swung one of the backpacks over my shoulder and nodded for Hollie to do the same, "Take one of those," As she did, I took Hayden's hand, "Let's go."

  "But where are we going to go?" Hayden asked in the midst of scrambling through the back door.

  I didn't answer. I wasn't really sure, to be honest. In the backyard, Infected seemed to come from all sides. Infected from up front were traveling down both sides of the house and one by one, they poured from out from the back door. Our path to either of the houses next door would be blocked off by the time we picked a direction. The Infected were slow but their numbers greatly overpowered us three. And I, unfortunately, forgot my baseball bat on the kitchen counter.

  Hollie inhaled quickly like she was on the verge of an asthma attack, "Oh, shit Dani! We're screwed!"

  Where can we
go, where can we go, where can we go…

  Can't go forward. Can't go left or right. I turned my head, but maybe we can go backward.

  I pulled Hayden along with me, "You two know how to swim?"

  "We're going to swim across the river? Are you out of your mind?" Hollie demanded. She caught up and tried to stay one step ahead of me just so I could see the horrified look she painted on her face.

  "If you have a better idea, please share it because I'm not too thrilled with getting completely drenched either!" She had no answer to this because she knew just as well as I did that this was really our only option that kept us all alive, "Now, can you two swim?"

  Hollie nodded though she still wasn't thrilled. Hayden looked up at me and shrugged, "I can but not very well."

  Better than not having him be able to swim at all. I quickly shouldered off my backpack and passed it to Hollie, "Think you can handle this too?"

  She nodded once again concerning herself more with the Infected starting to close in on us. I took Hayden's hand once again.

  "Okay, let's go!"

  The second I stepped into the river, cold water seeped into my shoes and stole the heat from my soles. It was frigid and I expected that being so late in the fall season, but no matter how prepared I was mentally, there was no possible way my body could have been physically ready for the iciness that bled into my skin.

  "It's so cold!" Hayden shrieked. He was knee high already, teeth chattering like a jackhammer, and he halted himself. He moved no quicker than a statue.

  "I know it is, but we need to swim," I pulled on his hand but he made no movement toward me. The Infected behind him were steps within arms reach. A few seconds longer and it would just be Hollie and I. My hand slid up to his wrist and I forcefully yanked him forward. He yelped but I had no time to feel guilty let alone apologize for it. I turned around and against my better judgment, I kneeled down, water climbing up to just above my collarbones, "Put your arms around my neck."

  A second passed and I nearly had to turn around to bark the order again but he slowly wrapped his arms around my shoulders and crisscrossed them around my throat.

  "Don't let my head go under the water, okay?"

  I couldn't make a promise like that, "Hang on tight and don't let go."

  Hollie was a foot ahead, waiting for me to take the lead again. The cold added onto the weight of a child hanging off my back, the pressure of the water was nearly enough to topple me. Now I'm worried my muscles could give up having to trudge through the dense water in this freezing temperature. I was taking a risk, all of us could get hypothermia, and this certainly wasn't going to help Hayden's sickness but we were out of options.

  Halfway across and I'm standing on the tip of my toes. My mouth is barely above the surface. The river wasn't quite as deep as I thought it was going to be but the undercurrent was strong. More than a few times I lost my footing and became completely submerged. Bubbles brushed my cheeks and in a superhuman effort, I managed to bob above the surface just enough to reel in a couple gasps of cold air before I'm back under. My head was pounding and the other side of the river never seemed to get any closer.

  Behind me, Hayden sputtered every time we broke the surface. His coughing was already clotted, now it sounded worse with the added water forcing its way down his throat and into his curdled lungs.

  Then against all odds, my feet found solid foundation. The bank was a couple hundred yards away and I could finally wade toward it without worry of being swept away downstream. Hollie plodded behind me, heaving breaths just as I was.

  "I thought you said you wouldn't let my head go under," Hayden grumbled between his chattering teeth. My eyes rolled.

  "I didn't say that," I kneeled for him to let go of my neck, "And it's actually difficult to swim with 80 pounds strapped to your back."

  I glanced back at the other side of the bank where Infected were still carelessly plowing themselves into the water. None seemed to be making it too far. Close to halfway and I watched their heads fall beneath the surface and never come back up again. Scott was right about the Infected not being able to swim I guess.

  Hollie dropped the wet backpack at my feet, "Alright, what do we do now that we're on the verge of hypothermia?"

  "Obviously go find somewhere to warm up," I picked up the backpack distastefully and nodded to the houses that stood silently behind us, "Probably in one of them."

  "What if there are Infected in them?"

  I shot her an annoyed look, "Then we'll deal with them."

  She didn't seem convinced, "But what if we can't?"

  My neck tossed back in such an annoyed manner that I almost thought I was going to wind up headless, "Why do you have to question everything?"

  "I don't question everything."

  "You kind of do! And it really pisses me off!"

  "Oh ya?" She took a step forward and pushed me. I did the same back.

  "Ya! And if you don't want to come with, you can gladly shiver your dumb ass out of here!"

  "I was just wondering! I don't feel like getting mauled today!"

  I laughed at that joke. It had to have been some kind of joke, "Oh, just today? What about yesterday? When you blew that gun off like eight times and attracted all those Infected? You gonna try to tell me you didn't want to get mauled then too?"

  "I wasn't trying to get myself mauled!"

  "Noooo. Not yourself. Just everybody else, right?" She said nothing. She admitted it yesterday that she basically wanted our group dead so that she could be daddy's spoiled brat again. Her eyes darted off to avoid mine and I continued, "How do I know you won't pull that shit again?"

  She took her time. Either she was thinking about a way to answer that or she was just avoiding the question. Didn't matter too much anyway as Hayden spoke up, "Hey, look!"

  He was shivering like a madman but his eyes glittered at the sight above him. Head pointed upward, his finger followed a small white speck slowly falling from the sky.

  "Is that...?" Hollie started, watching as more fluttered around us.

  I sighed. The fucking cherry on top of a fantastic day,

  "Snow."

  Winter