In the Lone and Level Sands

by David Lovato

  Zoe and Derrick approached the house, climbed the steps, and knocked on the door. They didn’t hear any movement, and the lights were all off. Derrick knocked again, but there was no response.

  “Be ready,” Derrick said. The two drew their guns, and Derrick tried the knob. It was unlocked. The door opened, and nothing inside moved. Zoe tried the light switch, and the lights came on.

  A zombie stood at the top of the stairs ahead of them, facing away from the door, apparently apathetic to the sounds coming from behind it.

  “What do we do?” Zoe whispered.

  “We’re going to have to take it out.” Derrick raised his gun at the creature at the top of the stairs.

  “Wait,” Zoe said. Derrick looked at her. “I’ve never fired a gun before, and this one—” She jerked her thumb at the zombie. “—doesn’t appear too responsive. Maybe I should get some practice in.”

  “Good idea,” Derrick said.

  Zoe lifted her gun toward the zombie, lined the sight at the end of the barrel up with the thing’s head, breathed, and pulled the trigger.

  The shot rang through the house, and a mirror hanging near the zombie exploded. The zombie turned around, finally noticing the two.

  “Shoot again!” Derrick said. Zoe fired two more shots. The third shot went a bit to the right, but the second shot hit the zombie square in the mouth. A spurt of red splattered the wall behind it, and it fell forward and slid down the stairs, coming to rest on the last few, crumpled up, still.

  ****

  After they had wrapped and moved the body, they checked the rest of the house for threats. It was empty and, after locking the doors and windows, safe. It started to rain shortly after their arrival.

  They searched the house again, this time for food, as both were running low. They packed their bags with the least perishable things they could find. After that, they settled in the living room for some rest.

  They conversed for a while, talking about things like music and the surrounding area. They spoke little of life before the last few days. This kept the conversation brief, and sometimes awkward.

  “So, where are we headed?” Zoe said after a particularly long and particularly awkward break in their conversation.

  “Sacramento,” Derrick replied.

  “What’s in Sacramento?”

  “My girlfriend.”

  Zoe paused. For the first time, she questioned staying with Derrick, thought about what effect it could have on her life. But the moment passed. “We’re not going to walk the whole way, are we?”

  “Not if I can help it. Honestly, I’m hoping whoever lived here left their car.”

  “Well, we can look in the morning.”

  Zoe and Derrick conversed a little more, mostly about music. Eventually, Derrick went off to one of the bedrooms for some sleep, leaving his MP3 player with Zoe. She listened to music for a while, and then fell asleep.

  ****

  Derrick woke Zoe up early in the morning. She had been in the middle of a dream, but it faded from her life before she could grab on to it, and by the time they had searched the house for keys, gotten into the minivan stored in the garage, and headed down I-88 at sixty miles per hour, it was long gone.

  The sun was shining, and the afternoon was just breaking. The buildings in the distance grew smaller and smaller, giving way to open fields of dead, yellow grass, other roads branching on and off from exits, and not much else. The sky was blue.

  “We won’t be able to follow this road too long,” Zoe said. “This part is almost never busy, but once it opens up a bit farther down, it’ll probably be blocked.”

  “Like that?” Derrick said, pointing to the road below as they hovered above on an overpass. The lanes on the right were filled with cars, many wrecked, one on fire. There were bodies and pieces of bodies everywhere, and a few zombies wandered around. One of them spotted the flaming car and dove right in. The lanes on the other side of the grassy median were almost completely empty. There lay some wreckage from the cars across the way, and the dirt streaks and broken edge guards suggested a few people had from one side of the highway to the other. But within a few seconds, the sight was fading in the rearview mirror, leaving only the images burned into the passengers’ heads.

  “Yeah,” Zoe said. “Like that.”

  A few more miles went by. There was a nice breeze, and for a while, they turned off the air conditioner and opened the windows, letting the summer air flow through their hair. The sky grew cloudy, but the clouds would not let go of their rain. The ones that did were far in the distance, long behind them.

  The afternoon was growing into evening when Zoe saw the house.

  It was standing in the field like an island in a sea of grass. It looked dilapidated, uninhabitable, like something that never should have been, but that fact made it somehow more beautiful. There didn’t appear to be a legitimate way of getting to it, just a small, unofficial-looking path of missing grass branching off from a nearby exit.

  “Hey, stop here,” Zoe said.

  “Why?”

  “That house. I want to check it out.”

  “What for?” Derrick began to slow the car and pull to the side of the road, toward the exit.

  “If anyone else survived this, they probably live there.”

  “I’m not convinced anyone has lived there this century,” Derrick said. He drove down the exit ramp and turned onto the small path that led toward the house.

  ****

  The paint was stripping, the wood was creaking so loudly it could be heard from outside, and the house was pock-marked with gaping holes. Derrick and Zoe could see into it in some places, and completely through in a few others.

  “I’m pretty sure nobody has been here in a while,” Derrick said. He and Zoe were standing before the porch, amid the long grass that danced with the breeze. Their car rested several yards behind them.

  “Guess I’ll knock,” Zoe said. She stepped onto the first step. The wood was warped and uneven, but once she had her footing, she made it to the next step, then up to the porch.

  Derrick followed. He stepped onto the first step, and with a loud crack! his foot broke through the wood. He stumbled a bit from the slight drop, but caught his footing quickly.

  “You all right?” Zoe asked.

  “Yeah,” Derrick said. “Wood’s too soft to even scrape.” He looked down into the hole his foot had created, and instead of seeing his shoe, he saw a glistening puddle of white. “What the hell?” He looked close and saw hundreds of little white things moving around. “Ew, God! Termites!”

  He jumped backward, shaking his leg off. Specks of white were flung from his foot and onto the ground, where most quickly scurried away. Zoe couldn’t help but giggle.

  “They’re crawling up my leg!” He grabbed a scrap of cloth from his pack and tied it around his upper thigh to stop the critters from reaching the netherlands, then began to shake his leg harder. Zoe broke into a full laugh, and Derrick realized his little dance looked ridiculous. He looked up at Zoe unappreciatively, let his leg drop, and collected himself.

  “All done?” Zoe said.

  “Yeah.” Derrick couldn’t shake the feeling that something was still moving around in his pants, but he decided he had made enough of a fool of himself, and whatever remained down there would work its way out once it learned there wasn’t any wood. Ignoring the puns that inevitably came with these thoughts, he tried the stairs again, this time testing each step in great detail before making his way up. It took him several minutes to make it up four stairs and onto the porch, where Zoe waited, arms crossed.

  “Glad you could make it. I thought maybe you had set up camp and planned to make for the summit in the morning.”

  “I’d like to see you keep a cool head with pants full of bugs,” Derrick said.

  “I’ll bet you would.” Zoe laughed, then she turned and knocked on the door.

  They waited for a moment and heard nothing but the wind whistling through the gaps in t
he house.

  “Think it’s locked?” Derrick said.

  “Don’t think it matters. Want to go in?”

  “Well, it doesn’t seem too structurally sound. It could be dangerous. On the other hand, I’ve always wanted to kick a door down.”

  Zoe rolled her eyes, stepped out of the way, and made an “after you” gesture. Derrick readied himself. He unruffled his clothing, took a deep breath, popped his neck, and then lifted his leg up, shouted “Yaaah!” and kicked forward as hard as he could.

  The door gave easily, but not in the way Derrick had wanted. His foot made a hole in it, which went up just past his knee. Then the door (as well as much of the front face of the house surrounding it) broke off and fell inward, leaving Derrick nearly doing the splits, caught in a hunk of wood, and dancing more than ever before.

  Zoe laughed until she cried.

  ****

  The house was even worse on the inside. Zoe and Derrick were too afraid to step very far in, but they didn’t need to. It was mostly empty, rotted, and what little furniture remained was turning to mulch.

  “So much for finding survivors,” Derrick said.

  “Maybe we should settle down here. Nobody will ever come bother us.”

  “At the rate this thing is going down, who would need to?”

  Zoe stepped onto a torn-up, moldy carpet in the main room and looked around the house. She turned back to Derrick. “Let’s burn it down.”

  Derrick looked at her like she was insane. “What the hell for?”

  “Fun,” Zoe said.

  “How is burning a house down ‘fun’?”

  “How is it not?”

  Derrick paused for a moment.

  “Haven’t you ever wanted to just set your house on fire?” Zoe said. “Just set fire to your old life, everything in it, and just walk away? With nothing to go back to, there won’t ever be anything to stop you from moving forward.”

  “But we don’t live here,” Derrick said in a somewhat solemn tone. “And I do have something to go back to.”

  He looked at the floor. Zoe looked at him.

  “Then let’s make a promise,” she said. “The world changed a few days ago. Let’s promise to never pretend it didn’t change. And we can bring pieces of our past lives with us. But only forward. And we’ll never reach too far back.”

  “…Okay,” Derrick said. “I have some matches.”

  Zoe was surprised. She thought the idea of burning the house down had long since departed. “We don’t really have to do it. I was joking, mostly.”

  Derrick reached into his pack. “If we’re going to make a promise, we should seal it in a way we won’t ever forget. So this house is the old world…” He pulled a match from a box, struck it, and the sulfur ignited into a delicate, golden flame. It flickered in the darkening house, and Zoe realized how close to night it had gotten. Derrick closed the box and threw it to her.

  “And this fire is the future.” Zoe pulled a match from the box, struck it, and smiled.

  “Think it’ll actually burn up?” Derrick asked. He smiled back.

  “Well, I wouldn’t waste gasoline on it,” Zoe said. “But if these tiny flames are all we see, we’ll just have to try that much harder to never forget.”

  Zoe joined Derrick by the hole in the front of the house. They flicked their matches onto the carpet in the center of the main room.

  As they drove away, the sun before them was dipping below the open highway, casting gold and orange and blood-red across an endless sky, pouring it into the deep purple of a growing sea of stars.

  In the rearview mirror they could see the house behind them, fading away into the same dark purple as it roared in a massive, golden inferno, burning long into the night.

  51

  After the Ferrington

  Jordan promised Ashley he’d stop by her house first. Her mother had been home, but Ashley hadn’t been able to get a hold of her. Ashley sat in the passenger seat, nervously tapping her foot on the floorboard.

  She looked at Jordan and said, “Tell me she’s going to be okay.”

  “Your mother doesn’t give up easily, and she’s really good in situations like… Well, in tough situations. I know she’ll be okay, Ash.” Jordan drove down North Olive Boulevard, maneuvering cautiously around the common wreck or dead body.

  “I hope so,” Ashley said.

  The car hit a bump, and Evelyn caught a can before it fell out of the basket on her lap. “So, after we make these stops, do any of you have ideas about what we should do?”

  “By the time we get to my house,” Jordan said, “it’ll probably be dark. I’m sure my parents will let you all stay there for the night. I can also drop you guys off at your houses if you want.”

  “We got no clue how long this shit’ll last, though,” Christian said. “What, are they just going to revert back to normal folks, apologize to the families they’ve broken up, and go about their merry way?”

  “We should stay together,” Ashley said. “We’ll be safer in a group. They’d just pick us off if we split up.”

  “Yeah, I am not going to my house all by myself,” Aiden said. “My parents are still in Italy. Makes me wonder, do you guys think this has spread all the way over there?”

  “I highly doubt that in four days, something like this could spread halfway around the globe,” Evelyn said. “It doesn’t make much sense.”

  “Yeah, maybe not.”

  “Hey,” Ashley said. “Is that a car?”

  “It’s coming down this way,” Evelyn said.

  The car was speeding over the posted limit by at least twenty miles per hour, in Jordan’s lane. Jordan slowed and pulled to the side as far as he could.

  “The fuck’s that idiot doing?” Christian said.

  “It’s probably just some dumbass taking advantage of the lack of law enforcement,” Evelyn replied.

  “The fucker’s merging back in line with me,” Jordan said. He released the brake and tapped the gas; the engine roared, and he moved away from the quickly approaching car. It merged into Jordan’s path again.

  “The bastard’s toying with us,” Christian said. “Either that, or, he’s trying to hit us.”

  ****

  “Why is this fun for you, Jake?” Alex said. He clutched his seatbelt with one hand and the overhead grip with the other. “What the fuck is fun about this? Are you seriously going to try to sideswipe those people?”

  “Alex, lighten the hell up! This will probably be the only time in our lives we can do whatever we want with no one to stop us. We’d be stupid not to have a little fun with it!”

  Alex looked at Jake, bewildered. “Jake! You’ve lost it! You’ve fucking lost your mind! You’re not yourself anymore.”

  “This is better! I’ve changed, just like you wanted, Alex!”

  “You’ve changed, but this isn’t what I wanted. Slow down and leave those people alone!”

  “You’ve always been this way, a passive-aggressive, worthless piece of shit! The most indecisive person I’ve ever met! Make up your mind! I’ve made up mine.”

  Jake swerved, coming closer to the car desperately trying to move out of the way. He put more weight on the pedal.

  “Jake! No!”

  ****

  The oncoming car swerved toward Jordan, who turned to avoid it, but sideswiped a car that had been resting on its side, long abandoned.

  Ashley cried out when she heard the cars scrape against each other. Those on that side of Jordan’s car instinctively leaned away from their doors.

  Christian cocked his gun. “Jordan, buddy, stop the car. If he wants to play this way, we’ll have to return the favor.” Jordan stopped, and Christian opened his door to get out.

  ****

  “Jake, if you’re not going to stop, just let me out.”

  “You’re being ridiculous,” Jake said. He made a U-turn.

  “Will you just stop the fucking car and let me out?” Alex said. “Seriously, you’re fucking messed up
and I don’t want anything to do with you!”

  Jake hit the brakes and came to a rough halt. “If that’s what you want, fine. Have a great life! Get the fuck out!”

  Alex got out of the car, nearly losing his leg as Jake didn’t wait too long for him to get clear. Alex glared down the road, not caring that Jake couldn’t see it. Jake sped toward the parked car. Alex saw a biker standing outside, pointing a gun at Jake’s car.

  “Hey, what are you doing?” Alex waved to the biker, but the man either didn’t see or didn’t care. He fired the gun. The passenger side of the windshield imploded, Jake lost control of the car, and it flipped several times. The sounds of smashing metal and breaking glass rang in the air, glass sprayed over the pavement in cascades.

  Jake hadn’t been wearing his seatbelt and was tossed around the car like a rag doll. When the vehicle came to a stop halfway off the road, Jake was hanging partially out of the windshield. One of his arms had been severed and the other was broken, the flesh left in ribbons loosely attached to the limb.

  Alex began to cry. He dropped to his knees, and then he saw a group of zombies hobbling toward the source of the sound, many of them noticing him. Alex drew his gun and fired at them.

  Christian returned to the car, and Jordan headed over. He pulled right in front of Alex, who shot another nearby zombie. Jordan leaned toward the passenger-side window.

  “Hey, get in!”

  Alex shot another zombie. He looked around him and nodded, with wet eyes. Everyone in the back seat made room. Before Alex could get in, an elderly zombie grabbed his wrist and tugged, knocking the gun from his hand. The old woman’s fingernails dug into his skin. He tried to pull away, but her claws dug in deeper.

  “Someone shoot this thing!”

  Christian leaned around Aiden, aimed toward the open door, and pulled the trigger. The woman’s grip loosened, and she plummeted to the ground. Alex grabbed his gun as another zombie grabbed the hem of his Rammstein T-shirt. He pistol-whipped the zombie, then came back with a shot to the head. Alex climbed into the car and closed the door.