Winter's Salvation

by Deyo, Jason

  They both followed and saw that the fire from the street was spreading amongst the ghouls, jumping from zombie to zombie and stretching toward the house. The undead on the porch reached for the women as they ran past and the orange glow of the flame was beginning to lick the underside of the roof that they were just sitting on.

  Drew ran across the street and glanced back to ensure they were behind him. As he looked back the wall of fire to his left was gravitating toward him as the undead were pushing through the flames. The zombies were scattering to other houses on the street and many bushes that lined the street were beginning to go up in flames with the undead bodies lying in them. He ran to the driveway and watched as Naomi and Sam caught up with him. The fire on the street had spread just shy of his driveway, and the few undead that managed to follow the escapees were moving to close to the fire and were completely engulfed and falling before they reached the sidewalk.

  When they got to the tall wooden fence Drew closed it behind them and guided them through the back of the house and quickly went to the front window to see how far the fires were actually going to get. The original undead that were hit with the Molotov cocktail bomb were laying in the street with their bodies still aflame. There were no more coming from up the street, but the groans of the undead were still loud coming from the direction of Naomi’s house. He heard the sound of the back door close and ran back toward it.

  He stood next to Naomi and watched her twist the pad lock on the door. Drew grabbed hold of the lock and twisted it back before she could let go. “I have to keep this door unlocked. I have a friend that will be coming through and he can’t be out there waiting for one of us to unlock it. He should be back anytime now.” From across the street and as they were running Drew never realized how tall Naomi was. He had to look up to her as he spoke and whom he assumed was Naomi’s daughter was just as tall as he was.

  A sudden movement from the back yard startled all three of them as they peered through the windows in the door. Falling from the six foot privacy fence was a figure of a man that was made visible by the bright rays of the moon.

  Chapter 12

  The Beach

  Eric was breathing heavily by the time he got inside the house. “Wow, that was interesting.” He said as he bent over and put his hands on his knees. He took a large deep breath, stood up and closed the curtains to the back door and took a look at the two visitors Drew had welcomed in. Eric was immediately taken back by Naomi’s height and then caught a glimpse of her deep set, dark emerald green eyes. For the first time in two months he found himself thinking about his hygiene. He began to think of how he must smell and whether he was clean or not. He bathed when he could, but hadn’t washed himself with a wet cloth in a few days and this meeting with this beautiful woman made him uneasy.

  “We can’t thank you enough,” Naomi said feeling out of place. She felt his awkwardness and wanted to fill the few seconds of silence. “My names Naomi,” she said to both Drew and Eric. “This is my daughter Sam.”

  As she spoke Eric put his hand out to welcome her into the house. She accepted the hand and grabbed it like the professional woman she is and squeezed it firmly. “Eric.” He threw his hand to Drew, “This here is Drew. If you haven’t introduced yourselves yet.”

  “That was my parents place across the street.” Naomi nodded her head and raised her hand to the front of the house. “They weren’t in there. They probably got stuck on the street somewhere going to our house.” She looked down at Samantha who was staring at her hanging on every word she spoke. Naomi continued to talk, but the volume of her voice trailed off to a whisper. “I don’t believe my parents will ever come back to that house.” She began to distance herself from her old home. “Their car is gone and their place is now on fire.” That broke her composure for an instant, but neither Drew nor Eric caught it. Samantha, however did and that caused her to lose hers. “Even if they did come back they have nothing to come back to.” Tears were now pouring from Sam’s eyes and rolling over her light brown cheeks.

  Eric was unaware that their house caught fire and wanted to comfort the two guest, but was not sure how to do it. Naomi didn’t give the impression that she was the type of woman that would welcome a hug or even any type of helpful pat. He was not going to approach her daughter because the vision of an angry mother bear popped into his mind. Instead he took the sympathetic, mournful approach. “I’m truly sorry about your parents.” He paused, “I didn’t mean to damage their house.”

  “No need.” Her eyes were glassy as tears continued to well, but she fought them from pouring from her deep emerald green eyes. “They weren’t coming back anyway. I am not going to hold my breath waiting for them.”

  Eric and Drew thought this was odd maybe a little heartless, but Drew turned on the part of good host. “Are you hungry?” Drew waited for any reply, “We have all kinds of food in the cabinets.”

  Naomi refused politely and made her way to the front windows. She watched as the front porch collapsed sending spirals of burning embers dancing high into the night’s sky.

  Sam joined her and they watched with a long, silent, hypnotic stare as the fire grew larger. Naomi snapped out of it and turned to Eric, who was trying to think about what to say about catching her parent’s house on fire. “Who’s house is this?” Naomi asked.

  Drew looked around the living room studying his surroundings looking for an answer. Eric paused thinking of his reply. He didn’t know exactly how to answer and not offend her. He thought about her fragile state of mind and whether she would blow up on him after he told her we just decided to break in, eat all the food, and sleep in a comfortable bed. “Um, I have no idea. The door was open and we needed a place to stay until morning.” He thought about how he answered her question and continued with a little more buffer, “We were just making our way north and needed a place to stay for the night.”

  “Where up north?” Naomi asked quickly to his response with no emotion. With the sudden destruction of her old home, she was swiftly building a new shell around her emotions and learning to adapt. She felt inside that the best way to get over her missing parents and being homeless was not to care about anything else. She did have one thing she could not turn her cold shoulder on and that was her daughter.

  He expected a little confrontation, but it never materialized. “We’re going up to Maryland.” “You have a long way then. Were you planning on walking all that way? The news showed the highways and they are completely shut down. All the busy or major roads are blocked and a lot of those things are on them.”

  “So far we’ve been traveling by foot. I would really love to find a bike or something though.” He looked to Drew, “Maybe we should start looking for some.” Drew responded with a shrug. “About a month or so ago when this first started, I got in touch with my folks, but the phones died and I haven’t heard from them since. I have to see for myself that they are ok.”

  “What if they’re not?” She responded coldly. Naomi was trying to find comfort with her new persona.

  Eric was taken aback by this question. It was legitimate, but he didn’t know. He never really thought about the outcome of going home and his parents not being there. Even worse, he would make it there and they greet him by trying to eat him. “I don’t know. I guess I will travel somewhere else.” He didn’t know what he was going to do. All that he had ever known was what he has always done, everyday waking up and going to work. Every day he would go out with his friends, or go to the local fast food or grocery store to grab a bite. He was used to having some type of agenda that normally consisted of doing something, normal. Yes he had been adjusting to eating on the go with every house that they stopped in, but what is going to happen when he wants to settle? When he gets to his parents place and they are not there, is he going to move on? The canned foods will eventually run out in the surrounding neighborhoods and he now realized that he has no skills to survive on the road or out in the country. Eric did not respond to the question a
nd fell into deep thought about how he was going to be able to survive and what he was going to do after he got to his parent’s house.

  A few seconds passed by and they all could see that he was in deep thought and angry with the question. Drew was the first to break this silence, “Are you planning on staying here? You can come with us if you would like.”

  Naomi had some doubts about traveling, but Sam did not. Sam wanted nothing to do with traveling to Maryland. Her thoughts were on her father. They had wasted more than a month staying at Mr. Cooks when they could have been out looking for her father.

  Sam responded quickly without weighing the options. “We are going to be headed back to find my father.”

  Naomi was insulted that her daughter would speak for her (knowing she wanted to do nothing of the sort). She responded with, “I think we could go with you.” She had to make the decision, not her daughter. Sam wasn’t thinking rationally. The more people they have the better they will be able to survive. Naomi knew that in her state she was no good to Sam and they are going to need someone to get the things they need. Plus Drew and Eric have proven that they could hold the dead off better than they ever could.

  “God! You hate him, so much that you want him to die!” Sam screamed at her mother.

  “You saw the news. The apartment complexes were destroyed.” Naomi screamed back.

  Drew stepped in, with an attempt to lower the noise level and also to justify her mother not wanting to go to the apartment complexes. “The apartment complexes are in bad shape. There were just too many people living, so close and so many were infected and didn’t even know it. My mom came home infected. By the time she walked into the door until the time she turned was a matter of minutes. I don’t know when she got bit, but that was just my house. My apartment complex was in complete and utter chaos just before we escaped.

  Naomi liked his answer and agreed with him, but Sam didn’t care what excuse or what the reasoning was for not going to rescue her father.

  “I promise we will go back for him, but there are just too many of them out there right now.” Naomi swore.

  “If you would like, you can travel with us?” Drew asked.

  Naomi smiled, Samantha grimaced, but they both agreed to travel with them.

  **********

  Traveling with two new sets of eyes and ears had its benefits, but bringing along different personalities also brought some tense moments. It took them a little longer to get through South Carolina than Eric originally wanted to because apparently women need specific items that men generally don’t need. Eric, Drew and Sam would use the bathroom outside most of the time and just take toilet paper with them, but on one occasion they had to stop into three different houses so Naomi could find the perfect bathroom to use. She would go outside sometimes, but they had to stop, so she could find personnel hygiene products. Apparently to Drew and Eric’s surprise using toilet paper just does not suffice.

  Traveling at night was a little different as well. Eric and Drew did not like to travel at night and only did so when they had no choice. Securing buildings in the dark was difficult and they tried to avoid it, but sometimes they would have to push the envelope. Having two extra bodies, one which was generally in pain during most of the day light hours, forced them to begin securing a building or house two sometimes three hours before night fall even crept over the horizon. Because of this it took them a month of travel to get through South Carolina and part way into North Carolina.

  One good thing about having Naomi around was that she knew exactly where she was going and how to get there. Originally Eric was thinking about following just to the side of highway 95, but Naomi convinced them to travel east to the Outer Banks and then north. This would take them through a vacation spot that would more than likely be deserted. Once people found out what was happening they would have rushed to get home and more than likely most of the people on the Outer Banks would have left.

  Naomi continued to talk about how it would be more than one hundred miles of peace and quiet once they got onto the main road of the island, but getting onto the main road proved to be rather hair raising. Naomi was right about everyone trying to leave the island, and apparently they all decided they were going to leave at the same time. The bridge off of the island was a maze of cars that filled both lanes and were pressed against one another. The cars were so tightly packed that they no longer made an effort to climb down and try to sneak in between them. Instead they walked from hood to hood across the bridge.

  There were no signs of any physical struggles with the undead on the bridge and just about every car had no useful items left in them. Eric crouched down and looked through the front and rear windows of the cars they walked over hoping to see a cooler, or maybe a bag with a few canned goods in them, but none existed. It was exactly what Eric did not expect. Every time they have had to cross a bridge or came up to a road block in the past, bloody hand prints covered the vehicles and shattered glass littered the road, from the zombies beating their way into the undead’s canned goods.

  As they came to the end of the bridge the cars started to space themselves out a little more and there was evidence that people had already looted these vehicles. To think no one else was doing the same thing Eric and Drew normally did was ridiculous, but until now there was little evidence of others looting vehicles. Eric was disappointed in this, but he kept it to himself. He glanced back at Drew and saw that he was on the same mission looking in the windows searching for food.

  After crossing the bridge, they passed a set of stores and began to make their way north up the main street of the outer banks. Eric thought about the other people looting the vehicles and what they looked like filled his head. He saw images of people with wild hair and pieces of metal and rubber tied to their bodies with ripped pieces of old leather belts like a post-apocalyptic movie, but then he caught a glimpse of a shiny black Mercedes in the drive way of one of the huge beach houses and lost that thought.

  He was never one for camping, or hunting, or scavenging for food, but he believed he could probably do it better than the lawyers or the doctors that were the likely owners of that car. Then something occurred to him, all these cars have been ransacked and left to sit for however long, but this vehicle hasn’t been touched. It was at that moment he glanced at the upstairs window and saw a small figure dart behind the curtains. He believed it was a child in white clothing, but it moved so fast he could not be sure. One thing he did know was, it was no zombie, because it did not start bashing its head against the window to reach them.

  He walked silently for a few moments and then said quietly just loud enough so the other three could hear, “Were not alone.”

  Naomi moved away from one of the cars on the side of the road and joined the rest of the group walking in the middle of the street. “What do you mean?”

  “I believe some people decided to stay. There are people in the windows.” Eric said looking straight at the road to avoid the group looking up into the windows. “Don’t look, but the house back there had a little kid in it.”

  “All the windows are open in most of these houses.” Naomi said after a few seconds of looking around. Not all the houses had cars in the driveway, but in a lot of the houses, curtains could be seen blowing with the sea breeze through the screens of the open windows. This is one thing Eric could add to Naomi’s list of things she was good at. She was very observant. Another thing Naomi pointed out as they walked was one house had the bottom floor windows secured from the inside with wood that was either pressed against or nailed into the frame work of the window. “People use the AC over here, they don’t open windows. If people left when this first happened they wouldn’t have taken the time to open them.”

  The wind was picking up and the evening sun was beginning to hide behind dark clouds. The wind picked up sand that was laying on the ground and all of them had to squint as they walked forward. “We’re going to have to find a place to stay pretty soon.” Naomi said as she st
udied the sky.

  “I don’t like this area, lets travel up a little more. Every once in a while I see something in the windows.” Eric said as he kept focusing on the road in front of him. “At least we know they’re not zombies.”

  “Really how do you know that?” Sam asked

  “They’re not falling out of the windows,” Drew answered quickly for Eric.

  After all of them began to feel uneasy, they decided to walk along the shore until they found a place they wanted to stay tonight. They were all amazed with how empty the beach was. For as far as they could see there was not a soul on the sand. Eric studied one of the houses and as he looked up a drop of water landed on his cheek, and then one of the children made the obvious comment of how it was beginning to rain.

  Eric looked up at a three story beach house and watched the clouds move quickly above the building giving them the illusion that it was falling over them. Naomi was looking to see which house seemed to be vacant, but Eric was looking to see which was the biggest and most luxurious.

  The clouds were turning from a grey to a deeper black and Naomi began to get upset with Eric’s search for the perfect house. “Eric we’re staying in that house there.” She pointed to the house just past the one Eric was inspecting. The windows were closed and there was no vehicle in the drive way. In a lot of the houses the windows were open and Naomi figured more than likely those buildings were inhabited. She assumed the buildings that were closed were that way since the beginning.

  There was a set of wooden stairs starting on the beach that led to a balcony that attached to second and third floors. They looked into each of the ground floor windows and saw no traces of life. There was a front and back door on the main level and then two sliding glass doors that led into two large bedrooms. These were all locked and Eric thought about how easy it would be for a zombie to just come walking through one of these doors and how much safer one of the more luxurious houses would have been.