by Sarra Cannon
Parrish raised an eyebrow. “Weird coincidence.”
Crash gave her a funny look and spun back around. “I think we have to start looking at everything in a different way now,” he said. “There are no coincidences anymore. Not between the five of us.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Just that it was no coincidence I started dreaming of you guys months ago,” he said. “No coincidence that we were all living so close to each other. That we all—or I assume all—have started experiencing strange new abilities.”
Parrish shifted uncomfortably. Hadn’t she just been thinking the same thing? They really needed to get the entire group together to discuss it, but the new girl had still been sleeping and Parrish didn’t want to wake her up. Who knew where Karmen had run off to. She was probably putting on makeup in the bathroom.
“Here, sit down,” Crash said, patting the seat of a rusted metal folding chair at his side.
“Thanks,” Parrish said, sitting down and staring up at the screens. “What is all this?”
Crash picked up a pencil and tapped it against the top of the desk. “This is the mess we’re up against,” he said. He pointed to the monitor on the far left. “This is a map of the United States.”
“What’s the red mean?” The map was covered in red. Parrish already knew what it meant, but she still hoped she was wrong. She needed to hear him say it.
“That’s the spread of the disease and the death toll,” he said.
Parrish closed her eyes, her stomach turning over. “How many?”
“It’s hard to tell exactly at this point,” Crash said. “A lot of places have lost power and many of the health departments have completely stopped reporting numbers. Most government offices have shut down. This is my best guess based on the numbers that are still coming in and the rate of the spread of this thing before the lights went out.”
“How many?” she said again.
Crash cleared his throat. “When the disease hit, there were approximately 320 million people living in the United States, give or take,” he said. “By my best guess, only about 75 million are still alive. Maybe less.”
Parrish brought her hand to her mouth and inhaled sharply. Tears stung the corners of her eyes.
“That can’t be right,” Noah said. He put a hand on her shoulder and squeezed. “You’re saying less than a quarter of the population has survived this thing?”
No one spoke for a moment, and Parrish let the numbers sink into her mind. A pandemic with those kinds of numbers would be completely devastating even if that were the only issue, but death was really just the beginning. If the dead outnumbered the living, how many of them were out there now, walking around?
“What about the rotters?” she asked, her voice trembling. “Is everyone who died turning into one of those things?”
Crash shook his head and leaned back in his chair, hooking his hands behind his neck. “That’s a much tougher question to answer,” he said. “There are a lot of intervening factors. For one, the health departments in most cities started burning bodies when the death toll rose to uncontrollable rates. That was a good move. But not every hospital did that. That also doesn’t account for the people who died in their houses and cars after the hospitals closed. From what I can tell, most of those people have risen from the dead and are walking around out there, but there’s not a lot of data online about numbers, for obvious reasons.”
“Why are they trying to eat us?” she asked. “I don’t understand it. I mean, I’ve seen zombie movies just like everyone else, but I never thought it could really happen. That’s what they want, right? To eat us?”
Crash shook his head. “Before yesterday, I would have said yes, but now? I think there’s more to it than that.”
So many questions ran through Parrish’s mind, she could barely get a hold on them. She was terrified to ask him anything else. Hell, she wasn’t even sure she really wanted to know the truth.
“You’re talking about those super-zombies?” Noah asked. “The ones who came after us, specifically?”
Crash nodded. He sighed and after a moment, pulled up a new window on the center screen. “I wasn’t sure whether to show this to you guys or not, but I think you have a right to know.”
“A right to know what?” Karmen asked.
“Come take a look at this,” he said. “Do you know if that other girl is awake yet? She needs to see this, too.”
“Do you want me to go check?” Karmen asked.
Crash nodded and the three of them waited while Karmen ducked into the other room. Parrish’s entire body trembled. What the heck was he about to show them?
When Karmen and the girl walked into the room, Crash turned back to his computer.
“Sorry to start the day with bad news, but I think we all need to realize what we’re up against here,” he said. He clicked play on a small video and enlarged it to fill the screen.
“What exactly are we looking at?” Noah asked, leaning between Crash and Parrish to get a better look.
“This is an infrared video of the rooftop of the building just across the street from where you guys were hiding yesterday afternoon,” he said. “It’s not a super clear image, but look here.”
Crash pointed to a human figure standing on the roof. It was hard to tell on infrared, but it looked like a woman.
“Who is that?” Karmen asked.
“I don’t know,” he said. “But watch. She goes down the line of five zombies and touches them with her hand or something we can’t see. Watch what happens.”
A single figure was visible on the infrared at first, but suddenly, another figure lit up in front of the first, its heat signature blazing hot. The first figure, a human, stepped to the side and lifted their hand. A moment later another blazing hot figure appeared on the screen. This happened five times total until there was one normal human standing in front of five red figures. The super-zombies?
Parrish cried out and leaned forward on the desk. “Play that again,” she said.
He moved the cursor back to the beginning of the footage and played it back again. Parrish could hardly believe what she was seeing.
“What does that look like to you?” Crash asked.
“It looks like someone created those things,” Noah said, taking the words right out of her mouth. “Someone created them with some kind of magic and sent them to kill us.”
“Maybe your theory about zombie assassins wasn’t so silly after all,” Karmen whispered to Parrish.
“I would have rather been wrong,” she said.
“You and me both.”
Parrish’s stomach turned as she watched the video again and again, trying to make sense of what was going on. The reality of their situation seemed to keep getting worse. People rising from the dead couldn’t be bad enough? Now there was someone hunting them down and creating nearly invincible super-zombies to kill them?
She closed her eyes and felt the room spinning around her.
As she slid off her chair and lost consciousness, the last thing she remembered was Noah’s strong arms catching her before her body hit the floor.
The young boy woke from his dream with the strangest feeling deep in his belly.
He’d been waiting for the others for so long, knowing they were out there somewhere searching for him. He wasn’t even sure how he knew. He just did. Ever since the disease that turned his mother had caught hold and spread through the city, the boy had started dreaming of the old man with the kind eyes. The man told him he was not alone. He was the fifth, and someday, they would find him. When they were all together, everything would be better.
Last night just after sunset, though, he’d felt something shift. Almost as if they had forgotten him. But why? Had he done something wrong? Should he leave his home and try to find them on his own?
He’d spent the rest of the evening curled up in his spot in the dark closet, holding his tattered blanket tight against his body. When the sun came up, he left
the closet and went to the window of the small apartment he’d once shared with his mother. How would he survive here all alone?
He took in a deep breath and shook his head. They would come for him. He had to believe.
He didn’t know who they were, yet he felt as if he’d known them forever. Lifetimes.
The sun was just coming up in the distance, its light shedding pretty tones of pink and purple across the sky. As long as he looked up, he could almost pretend that everything was okay. Normal. He could pretend his mother was in the kitchen cooking bacon and eggs for breakfast. He breathed in. If he could hope hard enough, maybe he would be able to smell the food cooking. Maybe he would be able to hear her humming as she worked.
But then his eyes drifted downward toward the street below and the game was over.
Rotting corpses shambled toward the cool shadows of the tall buildings.
He knew from the news reports on TV that people believed this was just some sickness. Like that time he had the flu and had to stay home from school for a week, only worse. A virus that got out of hand.
But the boy knew better.
He could see things other people couldn’t see.
He knew the world had not gotten sick from the flu. This was no normal virus, and even if there were scientists still alive out there working on a cure, the boy knew they would never find one. She caused this. The Dark One.
He trembled thinking of the evil woman trapped in the ice. On the bad nights, she was the one who found him in his dreams, turning them to nightmares no child should ever know.
She can’t get to me, he told himself. She was buried deep inside the ground where no one was ever supposed to find her. There was no way for her to escape.
Yet, somehow, she had grown strong enough to cause this. She had made the people sick.
He stared down at the biters and trembled. The Dark One had stolen their lives, sucking it from them like milk from a straw. She’d filled herself up with the force of their life and grown stronger with each person that died.
She was the one controlling them now. He could feel her dark power coursing through the dead. She could see through their eyes when she wanted to.
And she was looking for him.
He closed the blinds and pulled the thick curtain over the window. He didn’t like living in darkness, but he knew that above all other things, he had to make sure The Dark One didn’t find him before the others came.
Noah pressed a cold washcloth to Parrish’s forehead. She’d been out for more than twenty minutes, but her breathing had finally steadied and she was resting.
A drop of cold water slid down the side of her face and into her hair. Parrish opened her eyes and sat up. Any peace she had seemed to find during her sleep was gone, her eyes wide and her head shaking violently from side to side.
Noah gripped her arms and shook her. “Parrish, calm down,” he said. “We’re safe.”
She took in a huge gulp of air and looked into his eyes. “What happened?”
“You fainted.” He relaxed his grip, but kept his hands on her skin. It was strange how protective he felt of her these days. He’d always been attracted to her, but now that they were fighting for their lives, he found he was more worried about her than anyone else. What was it that pulled him to her?
Parrish shook her head and raised a hand to her forehead. The washcloth had slid down to her lap when she sat up and she grabbed it now, twisting it between her fingers. “It’s too much,” she said. “The sickness. The rotters. Now, someone’s trying to kill us? Someone’s sending those things after us? We’ll never be safe again, Noah. What are we going to do? Why is this happening to us?”
“I don’t know, but we’re going to figure this out together.” He looked around at the group gathered in the living room of Crash’s basement apartment. “The five of us. There has to be some reason we found each other, right? Some reason we all have these powers we can’t explain. Crash said he’s been scouring the forums and can’t find another instance of someone reporting supernatural powers or incredible strength or anything like that. It’s just us.”
“Do you think the virus did this to us?” Parrish asked.
“Not directly,” Crash said. He stood up from his desk and walked over to stand next to them by the couch. “Sorry to interrupt your conversation, but I think there’s more to it than that.”
“You don’t think the virus somehow mutated us?” she asked.
“No.” He looked around the room. “I think the virus awakened something that was already inside of us.”
Karmen took her headphones out of her ears and leaned forward. “That doesn’t make any sense. Are you saying you think we were carriers or something?”
Crash shook his head. “I know it sounds insane, but I think we were waiting for this to happen. I think we were born with these abilities, but that they didn’t activate until the virus showed up and the world needed our help to put an end to it.”
Parrish swung her legs around to sit up fully on the couch, and Noah took her hand in his. Maybe the things he’d been feeling for her were not just normal teenage hormones. Maybe there really was something connecting them. Something deeper than any of them could have imagined. There was a part of him that knew Crash was telling the truth. “Maybe we all need to talk about what powers we think we have,” he said. “Crash, you’ve had dreams about the future and you can do incredible things with machines and power. Anything else?”
“Should there be more?” he said with a laugh. “Cause I got nothin’.”
Noah shook his head and smiled. “No, I think that’s plenty. I just want to get it out in the open. Talk this through and see if we can try to figure out a pattern.”
He turned to Parrish, going around the circle.
“Parrish has enhanced abilities with her sword,” he started. “Before this started, she’d never even picked one up.”
“And she can ninja kick,” Karmen added.
Parrish laughed. “I guess that’s what you could call it,” she said. She brought her sword into her lap. “Something you said, Crash, makes a lot of sense to me. About us always having these abilities and connections. I know it’s strange, but when I was a little girl, my parents took me to Japan because my mom had a gig with the Tokyo Opera. We saw this sword in an antique shop and I don’t know, I just had to have it. I couldn’t explain it. It was like I just knew it was mine. My mom said no way, but my dad seemed to understand that it was important to me. I think he also felt guilty about pulling me out of school all the time like that. So they bought it for me. When we got home, they put it up on the wall as a display, and I never touched it until the day after my mom died. The first time I saw a rotter, this sword saved my life. I knew how to use it and how to move my body in ways I shouldn’t know.”
“And there’s more,” Noah said, hoping she would forgive him for sharing something she’d told him in secret. “Tell them about the ice.”
Parrish took a deep breath in and looked around the room. “Okay, since we’re suspending disbelief and all, I got really upset after my mom’s death and I started to cry.”
“Crying is not a super power,” Karmen muttered.
“No, but having my tears turn to ice is kind of weird.”
Karmen’s eyes went wide and she looked from Parrish to Noah, as if to ask if it were true.
“I had a similar experience with ice,” he said. He realized Crash and the other girl knew nothing about what had happened back in their neighborhood. “My dad had turned into one of those rotters and he came after Karmen. I didn’t know what else to do, so I picked up my bat to swing at him. My entire hand and the handle on the bat all frosted over with ice.”
“Whoa, that’s intense,” Crash said, running a hand through his messy black hair. “You had to kill your own father? Shit, man, I’m sorry.”
“Yeah, it’s not going down on my top ten favorite moments in life,” he said, trying not to think about the horror of that day. “But
what’s done is done. We’ve all had to do hard things since this happened.”
“You healed my leg,” Karmen said softly.
He turned to her and swallowed back fear. She was right. “When I touched the wound on her leg, my whole hand went cold and tingly. It didn’t totally heal her, but it definitely did something that made it heal faster and hurt less.”
“That’s why you weren’t hurt when the rotters bit you,” Crash said, his eyes wide. “You’re some kind of healer.”
He didn’t tell them about the way he’d tried to cut himself in the bathroom. For now, he simply nodded. It was almost more than he could handle to think about these new abilities. There had been so much happening, the truth of what they were all suddenly capable of hadn’t totally sunk in yet. Talking about it made it more real, somehow.
“And you’re stronger,” Karmen added, glancing over at him.
“You have incredible accuracy, too,” Parrish said. “Even when we were running, you never once missed your target. Even with two guns.”
He hadn’t really put it together in his head before now, but she was right. He thought of that day he’d been shooting hoops before his dad died. It was like he couldn’t miss.
“Karmen?” He turned to look at her, and she shifted in her seat. He wasn’t sure what her ability was, but he’d seen her put a couple of those super-zombies into some kind of trance back in that office building.
“I don’t know. Nothing special that I’ve noticed,” she said with a shrug. She avoided looking at anyone, and picked at her nail polish.
“Bull,” Parrish said, leaning forward. “You’ve got something going on. I saw you with those things that attacked us. What did you do to them?”
But Karmen didn’t answer. It was like she was in denial of her own abilities.
Finally, Crash spoke up.
“She can get inside people’s heads or something,” he said. He stared at her, not letting up. “Right? Like mind control.”
Karmen pressed her face against her knees, refusing to say anything.
“I felt it,” Crash said. “Early this morning in the kitchen. She was messing around with me. I couldn’t move my feet, like I’d lost control of my own body.”
