“I’m sorry, Valerie.” Henry shakes his head before hanging it low, defeated and without words.
“Sorry isn’t going to cut it, Henry,” I say bitterly. He looks like a half drowned, greasy coyote that has lived past his years. “You’re never going on watch again. In fact, I don’t want to see you for a very long time. Do you understand me?”
“What—” Henry tries to protest.
“Shut up, Henry,” Marko cuts in, still holding Katrina. “Just get out of her face for a while. Do like she says.”
I look back at my father, feeling Greg’s arms wrapping around my shoulders. I hate that he thinks that he needs to comfort me. I hate that he thinks that after everything that’s happened, I’m still a damsel in need of rescuing. Haven’t we all experienced enough? Haven’t we all realized that only the strong survive in this world?
It’s been over a year since the first crops began to wither, browning underneath the sun after the harvest of the epoch. The sun rose and within a week, super-crops were beginning to die. It was all the media would talk about after a while and in classes, it’s all everyone else would talk about. You couldn’t escape it. Everyone thought that it was a sort of divine justice for everyone who wanted to get rich quick in the agricultural business. In the Amazon, they were using it to hasten the regrowth of the deforest lands, a noble cause and one that we were all more forgiving of.
Everyone said that Africa was spending fortunes on acquiring the fertilizers used to help speed up and genetically alter the crops, in an attempt to feed their perpetually famine-riddled lands. That was probably the noblest cause of it all. It was tragic watching the Amazon shrivel and die and it was even worse watching the hopeful, destitute Africans sitting in their dusty crops. The wealthy hath provided and God hath taken back. There was plenty to talk about in every class. In fact, everyone talked a bit too much about it all.
But then the horror stories started trickling in, beyond the economic devastation and social collapse in these areas. Word started coming in that the crops and even lawns around the farms were dying, that neighborhoods miles away from the farms were losing their lawns and landscapes. I remember the first time the word quarantine was used, I felt a sickly, sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. That was the kind of word the military used. It was a word that never meant a good thing. The world was dying. From there, everything turned to history. It’s a blur of refugee camps, dust storms, global extinction, and a fight for survival that took us back to the Stone Age. All this time, I’ve thought about what’s best for Lexi, what’s best for me. I never stopped to worry about my father.
Truthfully, if there was anyone who was going to survive this, it was going to be my survivalist, wilderness-thriving father. And yet, here he lies. He’s lying there, cold in a pool of his own crimson blood. How could it come to this? How could something like stupid, worthless Henry be the end of my father? That’s not how this is supposed to go.
I let Greg hold me close to him. Honestly, I think men need to feel like they’re comforting to the ones they love. Deep inside their primitive brains, every man wants to provide for his woman, even if all they’re offering is comfort, understanding, and a shoulder to cry on. I’m not crying, though. I’m just staring at my father. I feel like since he arrived here, I’m seeing my father for the first time.
His hair is long, his face is covered with a graying beard. His cheekbones are sharp, his cheeks nonexistent, and his eye sockets look deep, blackened by stress and staring. His torn open shirt reveals the story of my father’s life up until the end. I don’t have a clue what the story is, as if it’s written in a foreign language. All I know is that his ribs are badly bruised, he has cuts all over him, and there’s another bullet wound in his side that looks like it was just starting to heal.
There is of course, the matter of his left arm, which looks like it’s been cut in half. I close my eyes and try to push back against the reality that someone chopped off my father’s left hand, halfway up his forearm. My father somehow survived that and strapped some sort of leather harness contraption to his arm with a knife sticking out of it. My father died with a bladed stump for a left arm. What the hell happened to him out there? What kind of journey was it for him to get here?
I have no idea what my father has been through, but I do know one thing. Whatever caused these wounds, they’re probably still out there. These are the symbols, the signs of everything we feared in the world beyond our compound. We fled when the riots started and we never looked back. My father, he went out into that world, looking for us, his daughters. He went out there and lost an arm, got shot, got beaten black and blue, and when he finally found us, his triumph was met by death. I close my eyes. I wish he’d made it. I wish I could hear the story from his lips. I wish I could make sense of all of this.
Chapter Two
“I want him dead,” Lexi growls after a moment of silence. Clearly she can’t handle the quiet for longer than a few seconds. I look over at her and she’s wrenching her way free of Noah’s embrace. At the back of the room, Henry is slumped down in a chair, looking at his hands. I don’t feel any pity for him, but I know that Lexi will do it. I know that right now, in this compound that has become our world, Lexi is the closest thing to a vengeful god that we’ll ever know. She brushes Noah’s hand away from her shoulder and glares across the room at Henry. “You motherfucker! You killed my dad.” Her voice is like lightning. He’s no match for her wrath.
Doctor Henry Gains made the past his present. Studying the battlefields of America’s dark and bloody past, Henry quickly acquired his doctorate in the Civil War. Destined for tweed, stuffy classrooms, and a career that made him detached from the rest of the dating pool, Henry never married. Over the months, we’ve all gotten to know each other fairly well. As for Henry, his life is a sad, lonely tale spun around the simple fact that Henry put his career before life. I never felt sorry for him. Some people find fulfillment out of their work, but Henry was never one of those people. For Henry, work was the distraction for a lonely heart that ended up becoming a dangerous spiral that he never quite found a way to escape from. For Henry, the disappointing life that he had was simply because he never went out and found the one. Now, he was locked in this house with a bunch of college kids because he was at the right place at the right time.
If Henry hadn’t been the one they flagged down on campus with a car, then he would have probably been one of the victims in the countless riots we heard about. Tony’s car broke down at the last minute, probably from sabotage. Either way, Kylie and Jess were lucky enough to flag down Henry who was willing to let us pack up our gear in his car while we took our Jeep. Without four cars, we never would have made it to the beach house with everything that we were going to need. We were going to have to leave things behind, or we were going to have to come back for it. Henry gave us the safest route, so we let him come along with us. We filled his car with supplies, put Marko, Jose, and Maria in his car to make sure he didn’t do anything stupid, and we made our way to the beach house, away from the lunatics and riots that were swelling and spilling out of angry bars, homes, and clubs. Words and protests weren’t enough anymore. People wanted blood by then.
I remember thinking that Henry was a godsend when he stopped at our house. He had no reason for taking that street, but he did and he was willing to join us in our merry band of survivors, heading to the isolated beach house to set up a compound, to wait out the storm. Henry had been our knight, riding in to save all of us at the last second. I had treated him so nicely in the weeks following his salvation-inducing appearance, but the storm arrived and it took all of our attention away from him and everything else.
Blood, death, and fire had found its way to Gainesville, and everywhere else in the world. It started elsewhere, but those reports were scattered. The riots started turning violent. People were getting tired of having their food collected by the government, only to have it distributed to other people. They called it communism. They ca
lled it unfair. They were tired of refugee camps being set up outside of their towns, turning into dens of crime, insanity, and debauchery. On the other side of those fences, people were tired of being corralled, being imprisoned in their own country just because they had the unfortunate lot of being born in the wrong spot. People had been tired all around and it hadn’t taken much to set them off. I remember hearing about entire cities becoming warzones. The radio would broadcast reports on official channels with very professional sounding experts, citing analyses and their interpretation before they were ripped off the air by pirate channels. These were the champions of the truth, fighting against the propaganda machine. They told the stories of those dying, of those fighting, and of the destruction. While green was being leeched from the world, so were the souls of those caught up in the maelstrom of death and greed.
We had listened to the student reports coming out of Gainesville, of the military occupation of the city. We could hear their reports of the abuse and of the protests. People were taking to the streets when we had left, so I could only imagine what these protests were all about. Law had broken down to a single, iron truth. Don’t attack the military. Everything else was up for grabs. Bodies were being found in the street as the sun rose and people were getting paranoid about everything. Henry offered us his wise, educated perspective on all of this, of course. He was little more than a commentator on the radio reports that we listened to religiously. While the men went outside and fortified our perimeter, Henry stayed inside, gathering what information he could. He understood war better than the rest of us, and war was the closest thing to what we were facing.
The day Washington was sacked, we all felt horror in the pits of our stomach. The President, the Cabinet, and all of Congress had been trapped in the city. Those who besieged the city were carrying military grade equipment, shooting down anything that could fly. They were gunning for the head of the country and after weeks of holding their position, of fending off their attackers, the last strands of order and structure were severed completely. Anarchy reigned that day. Hidden away in the background of these reports were the falls of Miami and Tallahassee, but no one cared anymore. I cried that day, because everything I knew and believed in was gone. It was all washed away by the chaos.
After that day, no one much cared for Henry’s commentary or the reports on the radio. What was left after the fall of civilization didn’t give us much room for hope or comfort. In fact, we were all pretty much left with the crushing reality that civilization was now all but a memory. What was left of the world was scary. What was left outside our walls frightened me and I know that it frightened everyone else. It was the silent topic that we were all avoiding. We gave our watchmen guns now with live ammunition. We threw our dummy rounds into the ocean. Whatever was coming for us now, it wasn’t going to be the military. It wasn’t going to be civilization or law. It was anarchy, chaos, and savagery. Paulo put a bullet through the radio one night after Henry tried turning it on.
That was when the rift formed between all of us.
Tony and the others wanted to go out there. To them, the world was the Wild West now and it was survival of the fittest. There was logic in what he had said, but there wasn’t a whole lot of humanity in it. Tony wanted to play King of the fetid Hill. He wanted to gather resources, to stake claim to better territory and he wanted to get others to join his cause. I don’t know what that cause was, but pretty much everyone decided that he was right. There were over fifteen of us who drove from the campus to the compound where another twenty were already waiting. To them, Tony’s words made sense.
I, of course, argued that there was no point to going out there. I told him that we didn’t know what was out there, that we would be making a mistake by plunging out into a dangerous world. That was when Tanya stated that we had the guns and the gear, that we could take whatever we wanted, and that we could be like the Roman Empire. It seemed like everyone liked the sound of that at the time. Even Greg liked the sound of being an emperor at the end of the world. He was close friends with Tony and when Tony’s crew took control of the compound, agreeing to leave us the lion’s share of the food if they could take the lion’s share of the weapons, Greg was torn between dreams, friendship, and me. Thankfully, he chose me, but I know that sometimes he wonders what it would have been like going out there with Tony.
They packed up after that. Everyone got drunk and partied with the last of the beer and alcohol that we had. Henry, Skye, Devon, Katrina, Marko, Noah, Lexi, Greg, and I were all that remained at dawn when they took all of the cars, except for my Jeep, and headed out into the world. They left us a gun and a box of ammunition each. They said that we would be their headquarters. They said that when they started making claims and gathering resources, they’d come back for us. We all agreed that if things didn’t go well, they could always come back to us without any shit.
We all have our different theories about what happened to them. I think they died. I think the world turned into one big scary nightmare after the last vestiges of humanity withered and blew away. I think that they found the anarchy and chaos that they were looking for. I think that there were hardened veterans out there in the world, who had fought and bled against the military and now had bigger guns, better armor, and a worse lust for bloodshed and power. I think Tony got the violent end that he was looking for, but I never thought much about it beyond that. He was dead. They were all dead. I know that. I never wasted time thinking about them after they left. Everyone else does though, I know it. While Lexi screams at Henry, calling him every name under the sun and then creates a dozen more just for good measure, I look at my father and see the history of the world beyond our gates slathered across his ruined skin. I see the madness that swallowed Tony and all the others.
I had kept the old crank radio down in the basement, hidden the moment we got here. While we were stockpiling the supplies in the pantry and basement, I had tucked it away for future use. When Tony and the others left, I snuck down in the middle of the night and gave it a few turns, searching the invisible highways for any signs of life. I have heard about the cannibals, of the flesh-eaters, of the devastation. I don’t know how bad it is out there, but now I recall the words horde, army, zombie, cannibal, hunters, and a dozen other words that had chilled my spine. There was never a way for us to prepare for the chaos of this new world, but I know that my father had taken to the wasteland and crossed it to find us.
Whatever horrors were out there, they killed or absorbed Tony and the rest. Whatever is out there, they didn’t overcome it. They didn’t conquer it like they’d promised and boasted about. But my father, he’d been out there. He’d made it across the wasteland. He’d made it from Ann Arbor all the way to the coast of Florida. How in the world had he survived where two dozen frat boys and gym dolls failed? Who am I kidding? My father was a strong man, the strongest there was. I look at the bruises, the marks of endurance, the signs of starvation, and the battle scars and I know that whatever is out there, no one can be ready for it.
After all the anatomy classes and all of the zoology classes, studying to be a veterinarian comes down to logging hours at shelters and clinics. It’s not something that I hated or something that I endured. It was something that I truly, genuinely felt passionate about. Helping animals has always been something that I had wanted to do. My father taught me how to set bones, how to bandage wounds, how to sew up a cut if it’s too bad in the wild, and all of it sank into my skull. For me, that was the fun of doing all the stuff that he wanted to out in the wilderness. Having adventures where he taught us about concussions or how to stop bleeding ended up being the best part of the adventure. My love of animals inevitably brought the two together and since then, I’ve never looked back. Over my years of volunteering at animal shelters and clinics, I’ve seen too many abused animals, too many neglected, sweet creatures and right now, my father looks like one of them. The world out there has been terrible to him, it has beaten and abused him, but it didn’
t break him. It tried, but it failed. Henry had done what the world failed to do.
“What are you looking at?” Greg asks me, stepping close to me and looking at my father.
“Everything the outside world has to offer us,” I say coldly.
I was right all along. There is nothing out there for us. There’s death and violence, but my father had endured it. He’d overcome it entirely. He’d made it damned near all the way across the country and if that wasn’t a testament to what was possible, then I don’t know what is. I think about his last words, how he told us that he loved us, that it had been worth it. More importantly, he’d been talking about Dayton a lot. I don’t have a clue what Dayton is to him. Now that I try harder to think about it, it feels like a piece of fuzz drifting through the air and the harder I try to catch it, the easier it drifts away. I close my eyes and try to think about it. Maybe the others heard it better. I have to hope that they did. I look at my father’s corpse and I wonder why ‘Dayton’ was one of the last words on his lips. It was important enough that he felt he needed to talk about it before his life ended. It was something that needed to get out of his mind. I’ll revisit that later. Right now, I can’t help but feel like my father is naked before the world and I want him taken care of.
“I’m going to feed you your balls up through your ass,” Lexi shrieks at Henry, the incessant torments and threats continuing well after I stopped paying attention to them.
“Lexi,” I shout at her. “That’s enough.”
Lexi looks at me like I’ve just stolen her favorite toy. Pure apathy shoots through my veins. Right here, before us, is our father. This is the man who raised us, who listened to us when we cried about boys breaking our hearts after our first crushes betrayed us. This was the father who learned to braid just so he could do our hair. This was the man who had watched Strawberry Shortcake with us on Saturday mornings, the only day that we could eat sugary cereal. He was dead, on the table, and all she could think about was harassing Henry. Henry would get his. Henry would find his moment when he would realize that there was no forgiveness for what he’d done, but that wasn’t right now. That wasn’t something that needed to be addressed in the presence of our dead father.
LEFT ALIVE (Zombie series Box Set): Books 1-6 of the Post-apocalyptic zombie action and adventure series Page 50
