by E. M. Fitch
If they left, tried to find their way to Kaylee and the rest, and they guessed wrong, or lost the trail, and then Kaylee came back, they may never find each other again. The world, always seeming so small to Emma, so enclosed and claustrophobic at times, was suddenly blown wide open. Her heart beat uncomfortably fast in her chest and she lurched forward, putting more weight on her leg than before.
Panic beat its way up her throat and left no room in her brain for pain. She moved faster, dragging Jack along.
"I'm better. We should go," she said, her words coming out in more of a squeak than she would have liked. Jack cleared his throat and looked pointedly around. "Well, we can't just sit here!"
"And when they come back? When they come here looking for us and we're not around, what then?"
"We can leave markers," Emma suggested, limping over to the nearest driveway. At the end of the short pavement, heaving with cracks and bumps, the mouth to a garage yawned open. Emma ducked inside, making her way to a shelf full of paint and pulling a few spray cans down. She shook them experimentally, encouraged when the ball inside rattled around. Jack was just behind her. She turned to find him frowning. He took the paint when she shoved it at him anyway.
It took less than half an hour to have all their belongings packed into backpacks and slung over their shoulders. A pint of vodka was nestled in the bottom of Emma's though she hoped she wouldn't need it. Already she was breathing heavily from the morning's exertion. Her calf ached but she refused to acknowledge it. It was a horrible, dull pain that would flare without warning, feeling like fire shooting up her nerve endings. There was a blister already forming inside her mouth along her bottom lip from clamping her teeth around the soft flesh to avoid crying out. It didn't matter now, nothing did but finding her sister.
And Bill, Anna, Andrew...
The last name was soft in her mind, a pleading cry that he be okay. Her insides felt disconnected, jostling about her stomach and chest, when she thought about those faceless men who had taken them.
She had made Jack tell her every detail as they walked back and forth across the empty street this morning. What they sounded like, the words they used, if they had hit anyone, hurt them in any way. He told her, haltingly, but completely.
She watched him now. He looked calmer than she felt, walking from car to empty car, checking visors for keys and peering into the homes they were parked in front of for obvious key racks. She jumped when he smashed through a window, sending glass scattering into the home and on the lawn.
It was almost callous, the way he went about business. They needed to hold supplies, he found backpacks to carry them. They needed food, he dug some cans out of a nearby garage. They needed a car, he was in the process of stealing them one.
He hadn't mentioned her sister's name. Not once.
She frowned. He drew his hand through the broken glass of the window, keys dangling from his fingers. He didn't look towards her, just walked to the truck parked in the driveway and yanked the door open. The car sputtered, the engine turning over as he twist the key, but after a couple tries, it roared to life.
"Ready?" he asked, speaking for the first time since he agreed to leave with her. She nodded.
"Oh, wait," she said, pausing in the middle of the road. He moved closer towards her as she pulled out her spray paint. In a giant sweep, she laid down a circle of paint that enclosed her and Jack. He added the eyes and she drew the smiley face mouth, remembering to put a tongue hanging out of the stick mouth. It was Andrew's mark, the one they had used forever to indicate that buildings had been cleared of food, the one that decorated the side of their missing motorhome. Kaylee would recognize this and know exactly what it meant.
Jack shook his can, it rattled in the cold air. He laid down an arrow, pointing in the direction he believed the men took off. He tucked the can in his backpack. They'd leave markers as they went. A way for Kaylee and the others to find them, or a way to find their way back, just in case.
Looking back, she couldn't be sure why they didn't hear them. It could have been that the sounds were drowned out in the rush of nature, the calls of birds and the brush of fallen leaves. It might have been the truck engine, rattling and spurting but humming a steady kind of hum that Emma recognized. Or it may have been that they were too focused, too fearful for Kaylee and the others and too trusting that they themselves were safe.
Emma looked into her own backpack, tucking her paint safely away. When she looked back to Jack, she froze for an infinitesimal moment.
Gaping, her jaw slack, black tongue protruding, an infected woman lunged for Jack. Emma jolted forward, pushing Jack to the side and collapsing on top of the biter. Her flesh was loose and rubbery, her chest caving in when Emma landed on her. The jaw never stopped moving. The biter's neck craned, the stench of rotten breath clouded Emma's face as the head moved lower and jaws snapped hungrily. Emma felt the scrape of teeth against her collarbone, the cold flesh of seeking lips clammy on her exposed skin.
She jerked back, crying out. The sound of the biter's head smashing against the concrete drowned her out. Jack brought his boot down twice, crushing the skull, before the body fell still.
She heard the moans then. Not from her, but from the rest. A swell of infected, hundreds, filled the street, swarmed from over the hill and through the suburban yards. They crashed through shrubbery, trampled the neighborhood fences. Emma grabbed at Jack's hand and let him pull her to her feet.
"Are you okay?" he asked. They moved as one to the truck. Jack stopped, staring at her when she got in the bed of the truck instead of the cab. She pulled her shirt down and to the side, exposing the long, bleeding tooth marks on her chest.
"I'll be fine," she said, sitting down. "But, just in case, it's better if I'm back here."
He stared for one short moment and then nodded. "Hold tight," he muttered, jumping behind the wheel and throwing the truck in reverse.
She jerked against the truck bed's window, slamming it with her back and then collapsing to her knees. She gripped the sides of the truck as Jack spun into the road, throwing it in forward before hitting the gas. The infected were close, close enough to scrape their cracked fingernails on the bumper. But they couldn't move fast enough to keep up with the truck. The horde grew smaller behind them. Emma let her fingers drift over the scratch on her collarbone, they came away wet. She stuck her hands out in front of her, but with the wind whipping around her and the truck bumping on the crumbling asphalt, it was impossible to tell if they were shaking. She felt sickened, a tightening in the base of her stomach. There was a brief flash of panic.
It might not be that she was immune to the infection entirely, maybe it was just that one biter. Maybe whatever Anna did for her directly after, cleaning the wound and pumping her full of antibiotics, maybe that's what had made the difference. She pressed her hands to her face, holding the sides of her head tightly, trying to see if the tremors were starting. She couldn't tell.
She didn't feel any different. But her stomach continued to roil. She didn't want to change, didn't want to die, but the thought that she may share some commonalities with the animals chasing them in the street, common enough to not get infected by them when they bit, it disgusted her. She hated that her body would betray her like this, that in some basic way, she was one of them.
The truck bed bounced underneath her and she grit her teeth. There was no point in worrying about that now. They were getting further and further from the direction Kaylee had gone.
Their bags were thrown in the bed of the truck, some basic weapons along with them. They didn't have anything fancy. A machete Jack found in one of the garages, a couple hatchets and a rusted ax. Jack had sharpened the handle of a wooden broom into spear-like object. Emma reached forward and pulled this into her hands. She swept her gaze around the street behind her and found no infected. Jack wasn't slowing though.
She turned and pulled herself to a stand, gripping the truck cab for balance. The wind whipped at her face, t
hrowing her hair back in brown tangles behind her. She squinted into the rush of air, one hand gripped the on top of the truck cab and the other held fast to her crude spear.
She saw them before he did.
A veritable wall of infected, thousands of them, were staggering towards them. They looked like an army, one from ancient times. Rags hung from their limping frames, they held no weapons save their teeth. They didn't march on command and yet they were one, an indivisible unit, a surge of infection. Emma pounded on the truck's cab and Jack hit the brakes. They didn't have to speak to know what the other was thinking.
He turned the truck and headed down a side road. It looked like it could go for a while. The horde didn't stop. The tires grit on the pavement but without the wind rushing in her ears, she could hear them. A low moan, sounding like one injured beast, rose and fell. It was pierced with shrieks and the faint thump of bare feet, coming closer.
Where did they all come from? How had there been almost no infected and now there were thousands? Some barrier must have collapsed, it was the only thing Emma could think of. It would be helpful to know exactly where that barrier was, where they were coming in and the best route to escape them. But neither she nor Jack knew the area. Neither had been scouting further than the block of houses they had camped in. Both were injured and had left the scouting to the others.
For the first time, she felt vulnerable.
Infected were leaking from between buildings, running at the car. They bounced off at first, only a couple stray bodies here and there. Then more came. The car rocked and shook as it sped over them. Jack's window was down, she could hear his grunts as he tried to avoid them.
And then another wall, another horde, twenty bodies thick in places, swarmed from over a hill. Jack slammed on the brakes. She could hear his breath, loud and harsh in the driver's seat. A man lunged from the side, his teeth catching on the passenger side door. Emma stuck him in the temple with her spear, felt the last shudder of life as she pierced his brain. He fell with a dull smack unto the pavement. Jack didn't even look at him.
"There's nowhere to drive," he said, staring forward at the advancing, snarling army.
"We have to run," Emma said, finishing his thought. She watched him nod through the back window.
He jumped out of the car, reaching for her arm. She jerked back, reaching for a bag with steady hands. She let out a shaky breath, both relieved and disgusted to find her hands so firm.
"This way," Jack said. Already the horde was bearing down. He turned and sliced the neck of an infected woman lunging for them. Emma brought her boot down on a child who snarled, black refuse hanging from her teeth. They ran to the woods, away from the streets and the concentration of biters.
They came at them from all sides. Emma's leg burned with each step, but she couldn't spare the time to think of it. She ran, noticing as she did that Jack's side was leaking blood. The woods were bright, the trees bare. Sunlight filtered through with no obstructions from foliage or vine. The infected stumbled past the trees, chasing Emma and Jack or just wandering to where they could sense the most food would be.
Ten minutes after entering the woods, they lost sight of the biters. Most had fallen back, not able to dodge through the bracken as Jack and Emma could. They could still hear them though, hear the breaking of the underbrush, the soft shifting and guttural moans. There was a short burst of noise and Jack and Emma both skidded to a stop. The bird song had gone, animals skittered away. From behind them, a sharp, piercing bellow was cut through with gurgling.
"Deer," Jack muttered. For one insane second, Emma thought he was using endearments on her. Her brow furrowed in confusion but then she understood. The infected had caught a deer. They were eating it. The noise from the animal subsided and all that was left was the pull of muscle from bone, the ripping and tearing that filled her nightmares was clearly audible in the still woods.
"We have to move," Emma replied. He nodded.
The woods they had charged into weren't large. Already, Emma could see the outlines of homes in the distance. There was a constant drone of moaning, punctuated with shrieks and snarls. She felt like a spy behind enemy lines, waiting for the bullet to pierce her body. But it wouldn't be a bullet, it would be teeth. They wouldn't do anything to her, not like they would to Jack; but the noise of the deer, the shredding of its flesh, was sharp in her mind. She couldn't be turned, but she could be eaten.
Up ahead the woods shifted. A hill, so sharp it was closer to a cliff, rose above the forest floor. Trees sprung out, straight to the sky, their trunks almost parallel with the ground from which they rose. At the very top, Emma could see clear sky, an opening. And just at the edge, so close to the cliff she wouldn't be surprised to see coffins poking through the soil of the hill, she could see the tips of gravestones.
Crashes from behind propelled them up the hill. Emma skidded on the leaves, using the trunks and the saplings that grew between them to haul herself upwards. Jack slid back, grunting. Hands appeared from nowhere, the nails bent and chipped, stained black and set deep in gray flesh. Emma kicked out. Her heel connected with one of the creature's jaw. The bone snapped under the pressure of her boot. Jack's fingers dug into her arm and he yanked her forward.
Together they scrambled in an vertical climb. At the top, Emma's fingers scraped against the nearest gravestone. She pulled herself onto flat ground. She spared a single glance behind her, watching the slipping and falling and still advancing horde of infected men, women, and children. They came slowly, but steadily, in a line towards Jack and Emma. They didn't tire; they didn't stop. Not until the sun went down. There was no way she and Jack could run that long.
The sun shone directly above them. It was noon at best. Her breath came fast and sharp. Her leg burned and her sides creaked. Jack was bleeding freely now, the whole side of his shirt saturated. Rustling and groans were rising again. Emma took her gaze off the struggling infected below and took in the clearing in which she stood.
It was a small cemetery, no more than thirty headstones. The biters were crawling over the embankment on the far side of the lot. They clawed at the mud, raking tracks through the dead grass with stiff fingers. It was a scene from an old horror movie, two people bleeding, stranded in an isolated graveyard, monsters rising from the dirt to attack.
"The farm house," Jack panted. He paused to press both hands to his side. "The silo. Can you make it?"
"Could you?" she asked, glancing at him briefly before turning her eyes across the lawn.
She hadn't even looked past the confines of the graveyard, but there it was. The roof was collapsed, a dark hole, yawning like a great mouth, the blackness of the house its oral cavity. The windows were shattered and hollow, blank eyes that stared over the cemetery, unchanging and unhelpful. The silo sat alone, a solitary beacon of sustainability. The sides were a dull, corrugated metal that must have once shone silver. A stairway spiraled around it, peaking at the top where a door was latched shut.
There were no windows in that silo, no light. It was the darkness that would save them.
Jack started with a burst of speed that surprised Emma. One last, great push before his body gave out. The last dredges of her adrenaline surged and her lungs wheezed with the effort to keep up with him. They skirted the forming wall of infected, only one set of cracked fingers scraping against the arm of Emma's jacket before she burst through the cemetery and into the tall grass that surrounded the farmhouse.
Jack reached the silo first. There was a small door, it reminded Emma of a doggie door, it wasn't much bigger. But they could squeeze in and shut it behind them. There would be nothing for the infected to grab at once they pulled it shut behind them. He wrenched the door open.
Emma gagged as dust and rotted corn poured out, covering both of their feet in seconds. Jack thrust his hands in, trying to clear the doorway, but it was no use. The corn spilled and spilled, clouding the air with eye-watering dust and filling their lungs with rot.
"The stai
rs," he coughed. She tripped in the massive, swelling pile of feed, landed sprawled out as more sifted on top of her. Jack pulled her free and she found her feet. The stairs rattled under her but drew her higher, in a continuous spiral, into the sky. From the top of the silo, she could have seen for miles, might have even been able to see where all these infected had come from, find a clear direction in which to go, but shambling feet echoed behind her and there wasn't time.
Jack pulled the door open at the top and they were faced with a rotten pile of grain that reached almost to the rafters. He jumped down on top of the grain. It churned underneath him, sucking him up to his knees in rotted corn kernels in seconds. It was only that the grain was piled so high, nearly to the rafters, that saved him. He reached up, wrapped his arms around the wooden beam that ran the length of the ceiling.
Emma jolted forward, calling for Jack to hold on. The thick beam of the rafter creaked under her weight. She tread slowly towards Jack, aware of the fingernails scratching at the door post behind her. Below the corn was deceivingly still. Her legs trembled with the effort to keep her balance as she carefully sank to her knees on the rafter.
"Get your leg up," she hissed. The infected creature behind her snarled, the noise ripping in an echo through the silo. Jack looked up at Emma. With one last grunt of effort, he pulled his legs out of the feed and over the rafter, panting at the exertion. The corn shifted, a sinkhole opened up in the depths of the feed. The body of an infected man lunged forward. Snarling and groaning, gray flesh reached for Emma and Jack even as the corn shifted and opened to suck the rotted body down. It muffled his groans as it filled his mouth. Emma shuddered. Two more got in, fell and were swallowed, before she could get the door shut to block out the light.
Darkness engulfed them and corn below fell eerily still, infected filled quicksand waiting for its next victim.
