We hiked that familiar road, now reverent, expectant, feeling the imminence of freedom.
It was a longer walk and, even though Kevin never complained, I was sure it was tough pushing the bike. I did offer to help twice but he declined, and we never even stopped for rest.
I felt apprehension as we turned the last bend in the road before the clearing where my aunt’s house stood proudly. I don’t know why I’d been expecting something ominous or overtly evil, but the house looked just like it always had—dignified yet modest, plain but homey. There was no dark cloud hovering over it, no blood splattered over the front of it, and it wasn’t surrounded by infected people. But, most of all, Larry…he was nowhere in sight.
I think Kevin must have felt relieved too, but he didn’t say a word. We didn’t stop at the house. I followed him as he continued pushing his bike up and behind the house, moving toward the barn. Once he’d opened the big side door, he wheeled it in and then said, “Before we do anything, we need to search the whole place, make sure it’s secure.” I agreed, and we slowly walked through the barn, checking every possible place a big guy like Larry might fit.
It was funny, but it was a moment like this that reminded me how much Kevin had become my partner. We didn’t even think about or discuss how we were going to go about searching the barn—we just did it and the way we did it was complementary. He would investigate the left while I’d scan the right, and I noticed that both of us also would glance the other way, checking what the other one had, and neither of us took it as an insult that the other was double checking. I didn’t know that I’d ever felt this compatible with anyone else in my life—not my brother, not old friends, not work companions, not even my husband. I wondered if he felt the same way, but I imagined he didn’t even think about it. Maybe Kevin was just one of those guys who meshed well with everyone. In our youth, that hadn’t been true, but maybe he’d changed. I know I had, even though, deep down inside, I was still that young girl brimming with hope. She’d just been twisted by disappointment.
The rafters weren’t such that anyone could hide up there without being seen. Still, we made sure to look from every angle just to be certain. When we felt sure we were alone in there, Kevin started looking around for different tools he could use. Once he was ready to get started, I asked, “Should I stand outside and keep watch for anything unusual?”
He considered it. “If you want to.” I nodded. It seemed like a good idea. “Just be careful and holler if you need me.”
I found a stool in the barn, one Kevin said he didn’t need, and took it outside. It wasn’t long before that sitting session began to feel like my life before, when I’d sit on my porch and ruminate. I found myself slipping easily into that mindset again, reflecting on the past several months but also looking forward to what was ahead. It was truly unknown, as we had no idea what we would be going back to…but I was overflowing with hope and good wishes, because all I wanted now was to hold my kids, to know they were all right.
The sun felt so good, like it hadn’t in months. It warmed me so much that I had to take the coat off, and I even felt a little drowsy, so I got up and moved around, flexing my hand around the axe. I heard Kevin muttering once in a while, but there was a lot of banging going on, and I knew he was making progress.
I walked inside and found my backpack, grabbing a bottle of water out. After taking a swig, I stood beside Kevin and, at a pause in what he was doing, I asked, “Want some?”
“Yeah, thanks.”
I handed him the bottle and, while he drank from it, asked, “How’s it coming?”
“Almost done, I think. What’s it like outside?”
“Gorgeous.”
“That explains why your coat’s off.” I grinned and he stood, handing the bottle back to me. “That smile looks good on you.” He took my face in his hands and kissed me, and I wrapped my arms around him, even though one hand held the bottle and the other the axe. What a strange world this had become.
But kissing was still as beautiful as it had ever been. When he pulled away from me, I said, “I think I better stop distracting you.”
He smiled but didn’t say anything else, instead turning back to the bike. I resumed my position outside, halfway expecting that things might have changed, but they hadn’t. If I had to guess, it was probably before noon when he stepped outside, announcing that the bike was ready. I stood and placed the stool back inside, picking up my backpack and his, and he started rolling the bike back outside. “Just one possible problem.”
“What’s that?” I asked, as he propped the bike up with the kickstand and grabbed his tire iron before closing up the barn.
“I’ve never let my bike sit that long. The gas is several months old, so I have no idea if it will even run.” He straddled the bike then and said, “Only one way to find out.” So, when the bike sputtered on his first try, I allowed myself to drown in supreme disappointment. Of course, I thought. Why should anything we try be easy? But the second try, it sounded different, and the sputtering became more insistent. The third time was the charm, and Kevin revved the engine a few times, and it seemed to make the shakiness of the engine, the part that wanted to just give up and die, pull through, and then it seemed to run on its own.
That noise likely made its way through every hill, every valley, every nook and cranny in those mountains. I was sure that each living creature there had to know—we were back…and we were leaving this place.
Chapter Fifty-seven
“Born to Lose” – Black Sabbath
KEVIN AND I knew that the noise of his bike would have alerted anything with the sense of hearing around those parts, and so we didn’t want to delay, but we couldn’t just leave. We were hungry and thirsty, so we took a few moments, grabbing more apples and a can of nuts out of the pantry, stocking my backpack with a few of the water bottles we’d fetched the day before, and draining our bladders.
“My helmet’s locked in Larry’s truck. Are you okay riding without one?”
“If you think I’m going to miss a trip home because of that, you’re crazy.”
“We’ll probably still hit some patches of snow in shadowy spots, especially going over the mountain.”
“You wanting to go the back way again?”
He nodded. “I remember the way. I’ve never been up here before till now…so I don’t want to get lost.”
“You remember the way back?”
“I’m pretty sure.”
He got on the bike and I straddled it behind him, wrapping my arms around him tightly. I hadn’t ridden on a motorcycle since I was young—pre-teen, if my memory served. I remembered having a fearful reverence for the beast and—after riding on the back with one of my cousins at the helm—vowed to avoid them like the plague from then on out. I had no choice now.
And I trusted this man.
He wound down the mountain from my aunt’s house slowly and without incident. We passed by Larry’s truck for the last time and I intentionally avoided looking at the dead…woman. I still couldn’t help but think of her that way, even though it had come down to her or us and even though I’d acted without hesitation because I knew I had to. She’d still, at one point, been alive and, no doubt, meant something to someone else—and I’d ended her time here on earth.
It was slow going and, as we continued making our way to the main road, a little unnerving because I just couldn’t shake my fear of being heard throughout the valley. Would Larry try to find us and stop us because we weren’t continuing to live out his survivalist scenario?
No, but something almost as bad threatened to stop us. Once we got on the main road, we’d barely started up it when several infected jumped out of the woods at us. They had no sense of self-preservation, throwing themselves in our way, and Kevin managed to maneuver us through two of them, but the third one grabbed my coat sleeve. I should have let go of Kevin, because then he might have stayed upright, but we were moving slowly enough that he managed the skid okay and caused hi
mself no harm. However, the infected man had me in his grasp. I was on the ground, hardly able to keep up with the way my body was being flung around, and the next thing I knew, his face was above mine. My whole world at that moment was his fetid breath infusing my nostrils and my vision was clouded with emotion—his eyes, though tinged yellow and bloodshot, seemed otherwise lucid. He still seemed human somehow and I felt sympathy for one brief moment. I wanted to ask him how he felt, why he wanted to attack me, but then his head bobbed to the right, and I saw Kevin’s tire iron take its place. He then kicked the infected man off me—with two blows from his boot—and extended a hand to help me up.
He started to ask me if I was okay when the man got up again, this time with Kevin in his sights. The man knocked him down and I poised my axe, ready to strike, but Kevin got on his feet once more. The man lunged at him, his mouth gaping, ready to plunge his teeth into Kevin’s neck, but Kevin kicked him in the gut, sending the man reeling. The infected stayed upright, though, and lunged once more. This time, Kevin punched him, and that was when I saw that his tire iron was on the ground. I picked it up and started to hand it to him, and that was when I saw that one of the infected we’d avoided earlier was coming straight for me. “Savage!” I yelled, and Kevin turned and saw that I was holding the tire iron toward him.
I felt my arm grow lighter when he took it, and then I brought my hand toward my other one to wrap it around the handle of the axe. I didn’t have time to raise it, so I thrust it out in front of me like a handlebar in an effort to stop the infected woman from grabbing me. She pushed against it, her hands grabbing at my shoulders. What impressed me the most was her strength.
Ah, but I’d grown much stronger over the last several months too. Unlike Nina a year ago, this version of myself was lean—nothing on my body was fat anymore. I was trim and my muscles had grown as I’d pressed them into service for survival. I pushed back against her, letting my primeval mind take over, working on instinct instead of intellect. She stumbled backwards, and while she tried to regain her footing, I brought the axe down. No remorse. No regret.
It was her or me.
Kill or die.
I could hear Kevin’s words from months past ringing in my ears, and I knew what he’d spoken was truth. I couldn’t live my life hesitating, because it would mean my demise and, up until this point, I’d lived with the baggage of regret. That too had to go, because regretting also meant that I was questioning my choices. My choices had made me who I was, and I had to accept myself, good choices with the bad. Every decision I had made to that point had made me the woman I was, and I very well couldn’t regret that. I had raised two children who had such promise, promise to make the world a better, more loving place; I had helped my husband live the best life he could under the circumstances; I had tried to make every life I touched somehow happier or more blessed.
No more fucking regret.
I was focused on those thoughts and those thoughts alone, and it wasn’t until I realized I had killed the other undead woman farther down the road—that she’d been running at us and I’d met her halfway—that I became aware that, once more, the danger had passed. Kevin asked me something, but I couldn’t register what he said. I only lost myself in his embrace and his kiss before we got back on his bike so we could make our way home.
Chapter Fifty-eight
“Over Now” – Alice in Chains
THE TRIP WAS slow. Not only did we have more snow on the road to contend with as we hit the highest elevations of the mountain before making a long descent, but then we had lots of mud and slush before we reached a paved county road, the first of many as we wound our way toward Winchester.
Once we were on pavement, I relaxed some. The road was no longer bumpy and the air wasn’t as cool, but the breeze against my cheeks was welcome. I began to relish the feel of the bike’s purr underneath my body and the sensation of holding onto my man firmly. The only thing that would have made it better would have been if we’d had no coats on, because then I would be able to appreciate the hardness of his body.
We were taking the backroads just as we had when we’d driven up all those months ago. We saw a car here and there by the side of the road, but nothing too out of the ordinary. Things felt strangely normal, as though time hadn’t paused for winter here like it had with us.
But things were different, and I could feel that too. It was odd, because I started sensing the old and something new. I began to feel disoriented.
Kevin pulled over when, at the rate he was driving, we were about an hour out of Winchester. I appreciated that he was taking his time, still scoping the landscape like we’d trained ourselves to do all those months in the mountains. It helped me get used to the idea of riding on a bike and it also helped me adjust to the foreignness of what should have been familiar to me.
He asked for me to take the backpack off so we could drink some water. He was looking down the mountain and, in the distance, just past the side of a hill, we could see the great plains of eastern Colorado in the distance. It was breathtaking, particularly after being trapped in a bowl of mountains for so long. The sun was bright and even warmer, and Kevin unzipped his coat. After chugging half the bottle, he said, “Know what’s weird?”
I smiled. “You mean besides everything?”
“Yeah.” He began scanning the landscape again and pointed to first one house and then another, both far enough that we could monitor them and escape from any potential danger before it caught us. “Did you notice that all these places look abandoned?”
I scrutinized them, but I knew in the back of my mind exactly what he meant. There were no signs of life—no movement, no people, nothing that would make us think someone were alive in any of these buildings that we were now convinced were deserted.
“What do you suppose it means?”
“I don’t know…but I’m curious as hell what Winchester looks like.”
So was I, so it didn’t take much to talk me into getting back on the bike. As we reached the outer edge of the city, there were more and more homes with less distance between them. The sun was low in the sky by then, but we still had at least another hour of daylight. It was hard getting used to the sun’s movement here, because at my aunt’s house, the sun would have already been dipping behind the mountain. Here, where there were mountains but they weren’t on all sides, the sun had more sky to move through before disappearing behind the horizon.
Kevin saw it before I did and slowed his bike. Just before the official city limits of Winchester, the place we’d sped away from last fall, was a huge blockade. There were two armed guards in front, and, as we approached, I saw that they were wearing military uniforms. A tank blocked the road, and I almost laughed, because it seemed like overkill.
But why were they there?
I might have been afraid if I hadn’t been so grateful to see signs of life. These two people were the first living beings we’d seen in months that weren’t infected.
Kevin parked the bike just a few feet away from the guards who had moved into a more defensive posture. They were holding automatic weapons too, and the sight of them sent chills down my spine. He shut off the engine and knocked the kickstand with his boot, standing in one swift motion. Something about the way he did it screamed bad ass at me and my heart started thumping.
This man, Kevin Savage—somehow, he had become my man, my lover. And he was protecting me, caring for me on a level I’d never experienced before. I felt my heart swell in my chest as he turned to me and held out his hand to help me off the bike.
This time, I felt the fatigue in my thighs, as I realized my muscles were adjusting to something they weren’t used to. One of the guards, a tall black man, peered at us from under his hat. “What’s your business here, folks?”
Kevin somehow seemed stronger, more forceful, but his voice was low and solid. “She lives here.”
It was then that I saw the other guard step forward to stand beside the first one. I felt some pride that it
was a woman under that uniform, and she appeared to be no nonsense. She eyed me coolly but said nothing.
The man looked at me as though to affirm Kevin’s statement. “I live on Lake Drive—north Winchester.”
“How long have you been gone?”
“Since November.”
He nodded and walked into the building—one that hadn’t been there when we’d left all those months ago. It blocked the two lanes of traffic that previously had been going in. When he came back, he held a clipboard and pen and handed it to me, asking me to fill it out. Then he looked at Kevin, “You from here too?”
“A long time ago. We’re together.”
“No address here?”
“Just mine,” I said, wondering what the hell was going on.
The soldier handed Kevin another clipboard and told him, “You can either put down her address or say that you’re visiting, and you can do it at that table over there or I can take you inside.”
We sat at the picnic table just beside the building. I hadn’t noticed it until the soldier had pointed it out. Kevin just stared at the paper scowling. I whispered, “What do you think that’s all about?”
“No fuckin’ idea—but I’m gonna want answers.”
I hadn’t registered that his voice was normal, not whispered, until the soldier said, “You’ll get them soon—as soon as you finish the paperwork.”
His answer didn’t make Kevin stop glaring, but he did pick up the pen and fill out his name. I was already working on mine as well. It asked for my name, address, phone number, reason for leaving the area, what date I left, and how recently I’d had contact with someone infected. For all I knew, I had infected blood on my pants or hands or some other part of my body that had barely dried over the past two hours. But I filled it out. I glanced over at Kevin’s. His was slightly different. Instead of asking his reason for leaving the area, it instead asked for his reason for visiting the area now and how long he planned to stay. He left the length-of-stay line blank but said he was here with me.
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