Lost in the Apocalypse

by Mortimer, L. C.

  Emily was more than ready to go home. Her cabin was a haven in a world of chaos. She only hoped it would still be in one piece when she finally got back. While she didn’t think zombies would have wandered that far out of Howe, she wasn’t so sure about coyotes or drifters.

  The journey to save Melanie had been fruitless. It had taken Emily nearly two weeks to reach her sister after the outbreak, and another two weeks of trying to get back had gotten Melanie killed. It had been all Susan's fault, really. If she hadn't been so pregnant and so slow, and if Melanie hadn't insisted that she come along, things would have ended differently.

  A snarl from the darkness brought Emily back to reality, and she kicked the Infected that was sprawled on the alley ground. She wouldn't waste a bullet on the mass of flesh that had once been alive. She didn't need to. The Infected had obviously turned a long time ago, probably at the start of the outbreak. Only a month, but its skin was rotting off. Its eyes were hollow as she kicked its head again and again until her boots were bloody and the creature had stopped moaning.

  Melanie was dead.

  Emily tried not to think about it as she turned from the alley onto the next street, but she knew it was useless. She wouldn't be getting home anytime soon. The sun was already setting over the little town and when the sun set, you needed to be inside. It wasn't a matter of what was fair anymore. It was simply a matter of reality. If you were outside, you would die. End of story. It wasn’t just that the Infected were more active at night, but that you couldn’t see where the hell they were. No electricity. No lights. Just darkness and decay.

  Emily walked a few more blocks, carefully avoiding any Infected until she got to a street of houses. She walked on autopilot down the road, knowing exactly how and where to step to avoid making noise. After awhile, Emily busted a window in a tiny, blue house that looked decidedly empty. She crawled inside. Breaking and entering had never been something that she had planned to do. Then again, neither was killing her kid sister. In this world, you did what you had to do to survive no matter who it hurt. You did what you had to, no matter who it cost you.

  She didn't bother trying to find anything to board up the window. She wouldn't be here that long, anyway, and the Infected weren't exactly sneaky. From the pristine condition of the house, she doubted that the owner had a toolbox, anyway. Emily made her way up the narrow staircase to the second floor, found the master bedroom, and locked herself inside. The heavy dresser slid against the doorway and she dropped her backpack, jacket, and clothes on the floor.

  The oversized bed had the softest blankets Emily had ever felt and the biggest pillows she had ever seen.

  She only hoped they would drown out the sound of her tears.

  Chapter 2

  Neil slowed the truck as they approached a sign.

  “Howe,” he read aloud.

  “More like ‘how in the world are we still driving,’” Cody piped up from the passenger seat. Neil glared at him, but Cody grinned at his stupid joke. “Come on,” he said with a goofy grin.

  “He’s right,” Kari said from his lap. How she was comfortable sprawled on top of Cody, Neil didn’t know, but he didn’t ask. The unlikely pair had been cozy ever since he’d found them outside of Forrest, trying to sneak their way past Z’s to get to I-70. “We’ve been driving for days. It’s time to stop.”

  “We’ll find a place,” Neil insisted. “South of town.” He noticed the blockage of cars on the main road. There would be no way to make it through the makeshift parking lot. What had once been a bustling town now was filled with abandoned trucks and minivans. All of them were half-covered in dirt: a sure sign the owners had lived on nearby country roads.

  “There are going to be plenty of empty houses,” Kari agreed, suddenly serious. Neil knew she saw the dirt marks, too, and knew what they meant. “You can’t live on a gravel road and keep a clean car,” she commented.

  “We need to go around,” he shifted to reverse and backed up, pulling a three-quarter point turn that would have made his Driver’s Ed instructor proud. He went to the last intersecting gravel road, turned east, then took the next turn south again. “This should take us past town,” he commented, but no one was paying any attention.

  Butter was undoubtedly asleep in the back of the truck, while Neil knew Robert would be watching, carefully keeping an eye out for other survivors, for Infected, for anything. Robert had been tight-lipped on his job before the infection, but Neil would bet half of what he did was off-the-books, special-ops type stuff. He had that look about him.

  They bypassed the town easily enough. When they turned back on the main road, Neil glanced back in the rearview mirror.

  “Lot of Z’s,” Kari commented. She was right. They covered the road and several turned to look at the truck puttering past. “Step on it,” she said. “We don’t want them following us.”

  Neil had been maintaining an even pace, keeping his gas usage low. They were at less than a quarter tank now and they wouldn’t make it far. It was time to find a place to stay. They needed to hole up somewhere, even for the night. Maybe they’d find a place they could stay longer, he didn’t know. They had been running for so long that all he wanted to do now was find “home.”

  Any place would do. He wasn’t picky.

  “There have to be houses around here,” Neil said. “And if all the Z’s are in town, I’m guessing most of the farmhouses are empty.” He took a random turn and then another. Soon they were in a forested area on a gravel road. They passed a house right in front of the road, but he kept going. If they were going to find a place to stay long-term, they would want to be a little ways back from the road, to avoid prying eyes.

  They hadn’t run into cannibals or rapists or murderers, not the way he would have expected. Not with something this severe, this extreme. Neil had expected an infection of this magnitude that had ravaged the world to bring out the darkest of humanity, but all it had done was cause people to squirrel away.

  Maybe the hordes of villains would come out later, he reasoned. Maybe strange leaders and factions would take over towns and cause some new, dark shadow of civilization. For now, though, everyone was still in shock.

  Everyone was still hiding.

  Everyone was still breaking.

  “There,” Cody pointed to a faded mailbox that was half-hidden by a tree branch. “There’s a driveway.” It was hidden from the road and Neil took a left into the driveway. The gravel road turned into a hard dirt area, not really a driveway, just a dirt space. He pulled up to a little cabin and they all stared at it. When he looked back, he couldn’t see the road. It was completely hidden by the trees.

  Neil turned back to stare at the house. It was a modest cabin, maybe two or three rooms, and there was a dilapidated barn, the kind you’d expect to read about in a horror novel, the kind that held ghosts and ghouls and axe murderers.

  “It’s empty,” Robert called from the back. “No car’s been here in a while.” He could tell just by looking at the dirt driveway, Neil knew, and he thanked the stars once again that he had found Robert outside that fucking base.

  Forrest felt like years ago: not weeks. They had all been lucky to get out of there alive. Once they’d crossed the Colorado border into Kansas, they’d met groups of survivors who had heard all manner of rumors about what had really happened.

  Government experiments gone wrong, people had said. Others whispered about something in the water. Neil had his suspicions though. After what he had seen that morning, he knew what had caused this. Fucking side effects. He’d had all his shots, except for that one. The others in his group had all missed theirs, too. There had to be a reason for that. Fate, maybe. Maybe just coincidence. Either way, none of them had taken Artovax and none of them had been turned.

  Not yet.

  None of them had been bitten, though, and there was always time for that.

  They got out of the truck and walked to the little cabin. The front door was locked.

  “Check the wi
ndows,” Neil said. “Before we break in, let’s see if we can weasel one open or something.”

  “You thinking this is the place?” Butter came up to Neil and stood next to him, hands on hips, looking around the area. He knew Neil wanted a place to call home as much as all the rest of them. They’d been traveling for a month. They were tired.

  “Seems as good as any,” he commented. He ran a hand through his hair. Long. It was longer than he’d had it in years. Eight years in the Air Force and he’d gotten a haircut every three weeks the entire time. Now it had been almost six since his last cut and he felt shaggy and strange. In a world when everything was in chaos, it would be nice to have something stable, something reliable, something dependable he could count on.

  “Not visual from the road,” Butter commented, looking around. “And we can put the truck in the barn if we like.”

  “It’s not big,” Neil said, turning back to the cabin. “And one story.”

  “Don’t matter. We don’t need much room.”

  Kari and Cody came over. They had been walking the grounds, looking around the barn and the trees.

  “There’s a creek,” Kari said. “I could hear it from over there,” she pointed to the trees on the north side of the property. “Fresh water, probably. If we’re going to set up house, this could be as good a place as any.”

  “We’d have to build a fence,” Butter said. He had been talking about it for weeks: his fence. He wanted a tall one: five feet high, at least. He wanted barbed wire on the top or razor wire, if he could find it. Butter had big dreams for his fence, but Neil didn’t care. Butter could do what he liked.

  They heard the sound of a lock sliding and turned around to see Robert standing in the doorway to the cabin, a wide grin on his scarred face. No one had asked Robert where the scar had come from. Neil doubted he would tell them, anyway. Robert was the kind of man who held secrets close to his heart and he would take them to the grave. He didn’t care to hear whatever story Robert had fabricated for do-gooders or curious old women who wanted to know about the handsome man with the broken face, so he left Robert to himself.

  “Bathroom window was unlocked,” Robert said. “Welcome home, sweetheart.”

  Chapter 3

  Emily managed to get a restless night's sleep before scouring the kitchen for food. She took some crackers and shoved some dried fruit in her backpack. Between shelves of rotten vegetables and moldy leftovers, she found a bottle of water and a can of soda in the fridge. The previous owners were gone, but they hadn’t left in a hurry. They had probably been at work when the infection first hit. Most people were. That's why there were still so many empty houses: no one could get home.

  Emily didn't leave the house the same way that she came in. Instead, she grabbed a set of car keys off a hook on the wall and left through the front door like a civilized person. She even closed the door behind herself. She could be civilized.

  She could be normal.

  As she slid into the driver's side and started the engine, the tiny car roared to life. The previous owner liked ska music. A Reel Big Fish CD was blaring. Emily turned off the music, much as she missed it, and tried to focus. The gas gauge was at half a tank. It would be more than enough to get Emily home if she could find a road leaving the city that was still clear. While this part of town was fairly easy to navigate, quite a few roads had been blocked with people panicking. Once everyone realized what Artovax really did, they weren't going to sit around the house and die. Instead, entire cities of people tried to leave town at once, causing massive traffic jams and essentially turning towns into death traps.

  Emily wasn't as familiar with Grimsby as she should have been. It was close to where she lived, sure, but the tiny roadmap in her backpack was crumpled and difficult to read. She realized far too late how dependent she had become on her cell phone's GPS system. Cell phone reception had lasted an entire day before going out. The electricity had made it three.

  She drove around for awhile, failing to find a way out of town that wasn't completely blocked. Finally giving up, she ditched the car. It had been nice while it lasted, the air conditioning a welcome reprieve, but it would have been too easy. Nothing was easy anymore.

  She found a road that seemed to lead away from the heart of the city. According to her compass, it headed east. That was good. That was where she needed to be. A line of cars blocked the road, making it impossible to drive through but not impossible to climb over. Surely there would be undead here. Holding her gun in hand, she stayed as close to the edge of the road as possible, never letting her eyes stray from the cars.

  Each step felt like it took an hour. Her boots crunched on bits of broken glass mingled with blood. No matter how many cities she went to, no matter how many roads she saw, the sight of bodies never seemed real. It never seemed to get any easier. You had to detach yourself from it if you didn't want to go crazy. Susan hadn't been able to. She had gone crazy. Seeing your husband blow his brains out in front of your 7-months-pregnant self would do that.

  Emily took another step.

  The sun was up now, shining brightly. She wanted to close her eyes and imagine a better world, imagine a more beautiful place. She wanted to pretend that she was anywhere but here, but she couldn't. She had to be alert. She had to be awake. She had to be completely on top of everything that would happen between here and the end of the road.

  She needed to make it to the highway.

  The world was surprisingly silent as she climbed over a tiny Volkswagon Bug that was sandwiched between two SUVs. As her boots hit the ground on the other side, she ignored the feeling that she was being watched. Emily always felt like she was being watched. Before the end of the world had come and gone, she hadn’t noticed the way silence was eerie. She hadn’t noticed that without the normal sounds of traffic or people, the world seemed scary.

  She was almost to the end of the road, almost to the first stretch of the freeway, when a moan let her know that she wasn't alone. Emily whirled around, urging her eyes to locate the Infected that was there. She knew he was there. She had heard him. No matter how quiet the creatures tried to be to fit in with the silence around them, the undead couldn't help but get excited when they saw fresh meat.

  Their low moans were what gave them away.

  Emily heard those sounds in her dreams. She had a feeling that when she was an old woman, she would still be having nightmares filled with the sounds of the undead.

  If she managed to make it that long, that is.

  At this rate, she’d be lucky to make it to next week.

  Suddenly, she saw the Infected. He was there next to the building. Emily glanced forward. There was nearly a block left of townhouses before she'd be in the open, before she'd be able to ditch the road and just run. Between her and her freedom there were at least a dozen cars she'd have to make her way around. Turning back, she sized up the Infected. He was tall and lanky. In a former life, he'd probably been a high school quarterback. All the girls had probably loved him. Now he was just flesh.

  She raised her gun and aimed. She didn't want to waste the bullet, didn't want to let the others nearby know where she was, but she couldn't outrun this one. He still looked fresh. With a loud bang she pulled the trigger and the boy crumpled to the ground. Immediately, moans from the surrounding streets and possibly from inside the townhouses began to fill the air. Emily started to run. She climbed over cars and squeezed between them until she was at the end of the street. The highway stretched ahead, still covered with cars, but now there were open plains on either side of the road.

  She ditched the road and started running through the dead grass. The brown blades crunched as she squished them. She didn’t bother to look back. She couldn’t waste time with that. They knew where she was, so the only thing she could do was move forward and hope she was fast enough today.

  The sound of her heart pounding in her chest drowned out her heavy breathing. All she could do was run. She headed toward a clump of houses, hopin
g it would give her a place to hide. They all looked abandoned and worn. Most of the windows were broken on these ones. Emily skipped the main houses. If the windows had been broken, someone had probably been inside. Who knew what they had left behind? Who knew if they had been infected?

  The growls stayed strong as she tried her luck at opening car doors. She couldn't hope to hotwire a car. That wasn't in her cards. Finally, though, a back door of a minivan slid open and Emily collapsed inside, closing and locking the door behind her. She crawled to the back row and lay quietly on the floor of the van. She was breathing so heavily that she just knew someone would find her. Something would find her. This was the end. She knew it.

  She tried to stop gasping for breath. She needed to stop. Nothing could make things different. Nothing could change her world now. In and out. She stared at the worn ceiling of the minivan, trying not to wonder what the different stains were from. It smelled old and rotten. Not rotten in the way a corpse rots, but more like someone had been eating macaroni and forgotten to finish the bowl. Maybe the family who owned the car had been busy when the apocalypse happened.

  Maybe they hadn't been so hungry after all.

  The world spun around her as Emily remained perfectly still in the back of the minivan. She heard the Infected growling. They were on the street now. They were looking for her. She wished suddenly that the windows were tinted, but they weren't. Reaching onto the back bench, she grabbed a dingy blanket and pulled it over herself, hoping it would buy her a bit of protection, hoping it would mean that they couldn't see her right away.