Not much.
He could not imagine a more impracticable education for the demands of the new world, than the one he received. What possible good was his degree in finance now? How would his knowledge of nonrecurring impairment charges, or currency fluctuations come in handy in the face of a horde of zombies? So far it hadn’t.
“Just give him a chance,” Sadie said in a low voice. Mark was finally coming back, still grumbling under his breath. Louder, she said: “The keys if you don’t mind.”
He tossed them to her and declared, “I want a rematch. When I’m not wearing jeans! And these sneakers, they don’t have any traction.”
Neil handed over the pistol and was only too glad to. He could’ve hammered fence posts into frozen ground with the thing. Besides, he had his Beretta and his trusty axe, while Sadie had her little Glock. She had painted the flat parts in a glossy pink. It was an ugly weapon, like frosted death.
“Excuses, excuses,” Sadie said lightly. “So should we try one of these houses?”
They took in the neighborhood and Mark’s sour look deepened. Though the street was pretty with its cherry trees blooming, the houses were of the two usual varieties and neither was good. There was the zombie home invasion type in which the house looked like a bomb had gone off within it, and the second type: the subtle human scavenged house in which a door might have been shouldered in, or a single window smashed but was otherwise intact.
When they were mixed like this it was a bad sign. Someone had scavenged the area and it was sure thing that they didn’t skip the zombie trashed houses.
“There aren’t even any lurkers,” Mark said in disgust. “It means someone’s been down here and killed them all.”
“Finding the right house is like panning for gold,” Sadie griped. “There should be like a central map back at the CDC so that everyone knows what areas have been hit already.”
It sounded like an excellent idea except that humans would be involved. “It wouldn’t work,” Neil said. “People would lie. They’d say they hit all sorts of neighborhoods so that those houses would sit like gems that they could come back to at any time. Then again people may be already doing that. Remember all those streets with the orange Xs spray painted on the doors? We just assumed those houses had been picked over. It doesn’t mean they were.”
“So what does that mean for us?” Sadie asked.
The answer was as clear as it was undesired. “We have to go further out,” Neil replied.
Further out meant all sorts of possible trouble and worse it meant they would be further from any sort of safety.
Chapter 13
Sarah
The Center for Disease Control, Atlanta, Georgia
Eve’s pudgy, dimpled knees locked, then unlocked. They locked again with a snap, like a tiny, soft robot coming awake suddenly. They then wavered, jiggled, and finally trembled with the strain of holding up her seventeen pounds. In the end she plopped onto her diapered butt.
Undeterred she again reached for the end of the coffee table. This attempt, her third, ended with her chin clipping the table and her eyes filling with tears.
Sarah waited to say anything. She paused in mid-crouch, fighting the normal motherly instinct to pick-up her baby and clutch her to her bosom and soothe. As always, it was a struggle to remain cold and calculating. No matter the extent of Eve’s “injuries” Sarah forced herself to barely react.
She waited as her tiny daughter made little pouty sounds. Ten seconds elapsed and then Eve again reached for the corner of the table once more.
“I’m doing the right thing,” Sarah told herself, despite that it did not feel right in the least. Rather it felt like the “man” thing. It was how her ex-husband had always done things with regard to Brittany, Sarah’s first child.
“She’ll be fine.” This had been a veritable catch phrase of his for Brit’s first three years.
“Sometimes she wasn’t fine, Stew,” Sarah said to the room, still feeling the anger after all the years that had passed.
Eve looked back at her, fat tears, near perfect in their symmetry sat on her lashes; one for each eye. “What a big girl you are,” Sarah told her new daughter, in hushed tones. The new world with its new rules dictated that she not be overly effusive.
Sarah hated it. She hated that Eve wasn’t allowed to cry. A few tears were ok; whimpering was alright, depending on the situation, but crying was just plain wrong. And bawling? Bawling was strictly forbidden. Sadly, so was laughter. Sarah could envision the playground of the future: a perfectly oiled merry-go-round whispering by as the children, sitting upright in the saddles of their garishly painted ponies, did little more than grin at their parents or wave with a shy hand. If there was laughter, it would be a soft heh-heh.
There’d be no more peals of laughter. No more excited whoops! Definitely screeching with the sheer joy of life wouldn’t be allowed, and if there was ever a skinned knee, the poor child would just have to deal with it...quietly.
“You’re a tough little soldier, aren’t you Eve,” Sarah said with a grim smile. Just like all of it, she hated using those words, despite that they were necessary words. It was a dangerous time to be a baby, or to even have a baby. Even behind guarded walls it was dangerous, because who knew what the future held? Stronger walls had fallen already and better soldiers had been overcome. Eve had to be ready for anything.
Since they were pioneers of sorts, she and Neil had carefully thought out their parenting strategy. They were setting the standard for all other parents to emulate—not that there were many. Of the twenty-one hundred souls left at the CDC there were eight children below the age of thirteen, with Eve being the only one below the age of seven. Nor were there many babies on the way; a mere handful. Women were rightly afraid to get pregnant—for themselves and their future babies.
No one understood this better than Sarah. She dreaded the idea of stepping a single foot beyond the walls and slept horribly whenever Neil and Sadie ventured out.
“They’re going to be fine,” she said, partially to Eve, but mostly to herself. “Daddy and big sis are going to be just fine.” She hoped. Sarah didn’t think she could raise Eve alone. It was labor intensive being so attentive, striving for the perfect mix of love, freedom, and safety. It was also a joy, even compared to raising Brit.
Back in the old days it was considered normal to hand your two-month old baby off to a nanny or some local lady with a houseful of brats. At the most people kept a child until pre-school and sometimes pre-pre-school if there was a government program in place—Head Start or some such that did little beside destroy the concept of motherhood.
Sarah hadn’t looked at it like that, not back then. Instead she had some fool notion that it was so important to work outside of the home, as if the world wouldn’t continue to turn with one less pharmaceutical rep in high-heels and a short skirt pushing her pills. She now knew the truth. She was a fool no longer. The truth was that she had one overriding obligation and that was to parent her child, to be a mom. Everything else in her life was secondary.
“Oh, Brit,” she whispered, picturing her beautiful daughter. At the sound of Sarah’s voice Eve looked back at her. She had one little fist shoved knuckle deep in her mouth; her chin was aglaze with drool. “Yeah, Sweetums. Mommy messed up with your big sister. I wasn’t a good mom. That’s the truth. I was a part time mom—nights and weekends only.”
Nights, when Brit was asleep. Weekends, when she was off with friends.
“And that’s why she’s dead,” Sarah went on, feeling depression begin to creep over her mind. “Brittany’s dead because I was only around when she wasn’t. What kind of mother is that?”
At the question, Eve jiggled head to toe, sat down with a light thump and then released gas like a conversational duck: quack, quack, quack. Just like that the spell of gloom departed from Sarah and she smiled. Eve smiled back, but just for a second. She then took on a faraway look, as if she were considering the geo-political ramificatio
ns of zombie migratory patterns. Her face slowly turned red until she lit up her diaper with an eye-watering stink.
“Are you saying I was a shitty mother?” Sarah asked with a shake of her head.
Eve replied: “Da-da.” Her only real word.
“He’ll be back in a few days and as much as I’d like for him to change that toxic waste filled diaper of yours, I’d be a bad mom…again, if I did. Wait here.” Before dashing back to the master bedroom, where the extra diapers were kept, Sarah gave a last glance at the living room to make sure there wasn’t anything Eve could stuff into her mouth and choke on.
“I hope you’re almost ready for a nap Evey-poo,” Sarah said from the hall. “Because mommy is…”
She stopped in mid-stride as a wailing sound started up from outside the apartment. It was a confusing sound, mainly because it was a new sound…or rather it was an old sound from the old days, and one she hadn’t heard in years and hadn’t expected to ever hear again. It was an air raid warning. Any alarm, by definition, was supposed to be alarming and yet this one was doubly so. Up and down it went with growing urgency in its mechanical voice.
Turning on the spot, Sarah raced back to the living room to stare with wide worried eyes out the window. The sky was a perfect robin’s egg blue, unblemished by a single contrail—the telltale sign of an inbound jet. And this was perfectly normal; exactly what any sane person would expect. After all this wasn’t London during the Blitz. There weren’t German Heinkels overhead dropping bombs.
Then what was the siren all about?
“Could be an accident,” she commented. “Or a prank.” She turned back to the task at hand, changing a diaper, though she did so with a troubled heart. This time she decided to keep Eve close and so scooped her up and took her to the bedroom. There she put the baby on the bed where Eve immediately grabbed her own toes—she knew what was coming.
“Da-da. Ba-dah, ba, ba,” she babbled, her blue eyes going round in her head with the warble of the siren.
Sarah sped through the re-diapering without answering her daughter; she was too preoccupied with the siren and her growing fear. Why hadn’t it stopped? Why did they let it go on and on? It had been over three minutes now and was driving her bonkers…
“Hey,” Sarah exclaimed, relieved. Finally, the siren had stopped. “That’s a whole lot better.” She straightened Eve’s pink dress and was just about to pick her up when she caught the sound of a more distant, or perhaps a more muffled alarm that had been buried by the siren. It was a repetitious: meep, meep, meep.
“Come on, Sweetie,” Sarah said, buckling her holstered Berretta around her waist and then hitching Eve to her hip. The gun was reassuring, as was the view from her window: clear blue skies, the football field of Emory University that sat across the road properly empty, and the distant grey/green haze of Georgia in the spring. There wasn’t a zombie in sight. So what was with this new alarm?
In just under two minutes, Sarah zipped down to street level and found the main avenue of the CDC compound clogged with people. Judging by the numbers she was the last one to see what the fuss was about.
“Sarah!” A woman pushed her way through the crowd. It was Shondra Davis. She was new to the CDC and like most people, very much alone in the world. After spending the winter holed up in Birmingham, starving and watching as her family and friends were killed one after another by the endless zombie attacks, she had finally decided to make a run for her life. Only by luck had she come east to the CDC. During her ordeal, she not only lost every person she had ever cared about, she had also lost over a hundred and fifty pounds. Her skin was the color bark and had the consistency of a bloodhound’s cheeks.
Shondra threw her flappy arms about Sarah and hugged both her and Eve. “Oh, it’s bad. It’s bad, isn’t it?” she asked, her brown jowls all aquiver. The same sort of worried question riddled the crowd.
“I don’t know,” Sarah replied, trying to see over the taller woman. “I don’t even know what’s happening.” As far as she could tell, nothing was happening. The alarm seemed to be drifting up out of the depths of the main CDC lab, from which people scurried, looking back as they did, as if something was after them.
“I guess no one does,” Shondra said. She hadn’t moved to relinquish her hold on Sarah.
A man in front turned around and said in a thick Alabama accent, “They may-could have stiffs up in there. You know, to do speariments on. I betcha some got out and are eatin’ everyone in sight.”
“Would they make this much ruckus over a few stiffs?” another asked. He was a tall stick of a fellow with radar dish ears and a web of wrinkles around his eyes. He answered his own question, “I really doubt it.”
The man from Alabama gave him a sneer and asked, “Since y’all so smart, Ein-stein, what do y’all figger it is?”
“Germs,” he answered, hushing the crowd with his one word answer. “That there is the CDC. It’s where they keep all the germs. My guess it wasn’t no zombies what got out. It’s the germs what got out.”
Chapter 14
Neil
Ola, Georgia
“Nothing! Only more dead ends,” Mark grumbled, kicking open the screen door with a bang and stepping out of the house. As Sadie had mentioned, on many occasions, he was a strapping young man; beneath his weight the weathered boards of the wraparound porch groaned.
Irritated by the noise and the whining, Neil followed him out, rolling his eyes behind Mark’s back. “At least it wasn’t picked over,” Neil said. “It should give us some hope that we’ll find a good house around here somewhere.”
The bigger man turned just as he was about to go down the steps and shook his head so that his brown hair swung in his eyes; his hair was long even by apocalypse standards—another strike against him in Neil's mind. “That’s completely fuckery!" Mark exclaimed, flipping his head back to clear his eyes. "The truth is the exact opposite. The fact that the house wasn’t picked over and was still useless means…I don’t know what. But it’s all fucked. I mean, where’s the damned food?”
“Eaten,” Neil said, simply. He was too tired to be as animated as Mark over things he couldn't change. “Whoever lived here ate all of it, down to the last saltine. But that doesn’t mean there weren’t homes that were broken into by the stiffs. Those homes might be packed with all sorts of stuff.”
“And they might not. Shit! We’re wasting our time.”
“Mark, calm down, please,” Sadie said. She had been on guard outside and she pointed to a few zombies headed their way. They were on a somewhat secluded street, in a small town that was midway between the rural life of the country and the last vestiges of suburbia. The homes were large and further apart, but there were still plenty of them. More than enough to house zombies in numbers that they didn’t want to tussle with.
Mark glanced at the stiffs and then snorted in derision.
Neil, however took them in with an experienced eye, judging the difficulty of killing them without getting bit or scratched. They were whole and healthy, and walked quicker than the average, which wasn’t good. “Sadie, come on up here. The porch steps will stymie them long enough for us to put them out of their misery.”
“I swear I don’t get you, Neil,” Mark said with a bit of a smile, relaxing somewhat. “Whoever uses a word like stymie? And what misery? Those fuckers are the ones causing all the misery.”
Not for the first time Neil glanced to Sadie, wearing a look that made it clear he couldn’t understand what she saw in him. She caught the look, smiled thinly and came up the steps to wait for the zombies to arrive.
Neil killed them one after another—the steps did indeed flummox them so that their deaths were not particularly difficult. Though he did get some black blood on his sleeve. “There’s probably a better way to do this,” he said, wiping his light jacket on the long grass of the front yard.
“There is,” Mark said. “It’s called using a fucking gun.”
“I said a better way, Mark. Not a w
ay to have every zombie in a five mile radius coming down on us.”
Sadie skipped down the stairs, intentionally ignoring the corpses as she always did. “Maybe you can use my baseball bat. There’d be less blood. I hate the blood the most. It’s so gross.”
“A bat is not such a sure thing when it comes to killing them,” Neil replied. “Some have heads like granite.” And it hurts my hands, he didn't add, not wanting to appear wimpy around Mark.
With his bloody axe resting on his shoulder, he stood thinking on the subject of killing zombies. He hated the blood as well. After every killing he would fastidiously inspect his skin and clothes to make sure he hadn’t been splattered. But it was not the actual killing that had him thinking on the subject. It was the danger in killing.
Slaying zombies quietly in close quarter combat was a fairly hazardous undertaking. One slip of the hands or one accidental trip could mean a very bad death. Neil had tried using a bow and arrow with very poor results. Part of this was due to his lack of skill, however the way a zombie lurched in an unpredictable manner meant a head shot—a real killing headshot—wasn’t going to be easy for anyone.
“Let's see, you don’t like guns or axes or bats,” Mark said, counting on his fingers with the mention of each different weapon. “I would suggest a spear, only I’m thinking that would be too icky for you as well. Maybe you should try putting them in time-out.”
This actually triggered a thought in Neil, despite the flippancy of the remark. However, the thought went out the window when Mark continued in falsetto: “You naughty, naughty zombie. If you won’t eat all your brains, it’ll be the corner for you! And this time I mean it.”
Sadie forced out an uncomfortable laugh and tried to change the subject, “So, where are we going to spend the night? Not here I hope. That front door looks rickety as hell.”
The Undead World (Book 2): The Apocalypse Survivors Page 11
