Refuge: Tales from a Zombie Apocalypse

by Anthea Strezze

  ***

  Lanie watched until the dead were out of sight, and then she watched some more. She couldn't get it out of her mind, the way that one zombie had turned and looked at her, at her, as if there was no scope or wall in the way.

  Finally, though, she had to accept that there was nothing more to see for the moment.

  "I think they're smarter than we've been giving them credit for," she said, turning away from the scope to face Keller. "They knew we were in here, otherwise why stay so long, and why cover the scope?"

  "Are they gone?" he asked. "Maybe we should get out of here, before they come back."

  "I told you - they're smarter than you think. They may be waiting for us to do exactly that, just out of sight."

  "But… they don't move fast. As long as we have a head start, we can outrun them."

  "Outrun them to where?" She shook her head. Being stuck in the bunker with zombies surrounding them had sucked, but at least they seemed to be safe. Abandoning that to go running off willy-nilly seemed like a bad idea. "Do you have a plan?" she asked. "And what if they surround us? Then it won't matter how fast we run."

  "So… what? Just stay here, forever?" Keller's voice cracked, and he looked like he was going to cry.

  Lanie wasn't sure whether she wanted to comfort him or smack him. "I thought that was your plan when you invited me here. You said you had it stocked for the apocalypse, and we could stay here for years if we needed to."

  Keller squirmed. "I might have... exaggerated a bit."

  "But… you've got extra storage somewhere, right?" She had assumed, when they first arrived, based on what he had told her. What she could see right now might last three weeks, but definitely not years.

  "What you see is what you get," he said. "Three or four months, tops." He shrugged, and peered out the scope again. "I didn't think we'd need more than that."

  "You lied to me!"

  "No I didn't."

  "You said you had this place stocked for years when you talked me into coming here with you. Now you're saying months, but unless there's something you haven't shown me, we've got weeks. Tops." She spat the last word back at him. They glared at each other a moment, then she shook her head and sighed. "What were you thinking?"

  "Mainly, I was thinking we needed to get out of there. And this place was actually my granddad's. He died a couple of months ago - before the flu outbreak. He left this to me, and I thought, you know, that it might be a good vacation place if I fixed it up. But then the flu hit, and then your uncle... I mean, it just seemed like the obvious place to go. Serendipity, and all that."

  She looked around at the supplies and sighed again. "I'm an idiot... I should have just gone to the official shelter. That high school was already practically a fortress, and they had all the relief supplies there."

  Keller scoffed. "Yeah, like they're not down to sizing each other up for breakfast by now. If they're not all zombies themselves... I mean, cities are always deathtraps in all the movies."

  "Movies!"

  "What else do we have to go on?"

  Lanie kicked one of the bins and went back to the scope, trying to pretend she was actually interested in looking at the trees. She stiffened when Keller wrapped his arms around her from behind, but relaxed a little when he didn't do anything else.

  After a few minutes of standing still together, she leaned back against him and relaxed a bit more.

  "I'm sorry," Keller said, talking into her hair. "I know this hasn't turned out the way either of us thought it would, but I think it's important to admit that neither of us were prepared for a real zombie apocalypse."

  Lanie snorted a laugh. "I don't think either of us was even prepared for a perfectly mundane bird flu apocalypse."

  "Right," he said. "So nobody's really been playing with a full deck for at least a month, since we realized just how bad things were going to get with the pandemic. Then add the dead rising up and recruiting the living to join their ranks, and... I think we're doing the best we can."

  Lanie nodded, and stepped away from him, looking around the room again. "I think the first thing we should do is take an inventory," she said. "Figure out exactly what we've got, and what we can do with it."

  "We might be able to cannibalize something useful from the truck, too. Like in those survival shows. I know I don't want to try another filling station, and she was down to fumes by the time we got here. I don't even know if she'll start again."

  "Survival shows?" Lanie quirked an eyebrow at him.

  "You know, like..." He rattled off a few names. "I like that one the best," he said of the last show on his list. "With that one, you know he's actually out there, actually doing everything. There was this one time..."

  Lanie held up a hand to stop him, trying not to laugh at his enthusiasm. "I think my dad watched some of the same shows. So what did you do before all this? Any survival experience?"

  He shrugged, grimacing. "Computer programmer. I'm not even sure I can start a fire without matches."

  "I can probably start a fire with flint and steel, if we find some in the inventory. Did you say this place was stocked by your grandfather? Or was some of this you?"

  "Mostly him. I took a weekend to come see it, after I found out, but all I brought was an extra case of bottled water."

  "Water is good. I'm not going to complain about water." Suiting actions to words, she opened a bottle and took a sip. Then she opened a storage bin and started pulling everything out.

  "So what were you? Before?"

  "Kindergarten teacher."

  "Seriously?" She didn't respond. "Sorry. I know a lot of kids have died. It just surprised me - you shoot really well for a kindergarten teacher."

  "Dad was a libertarian," she said, trying not to think about her former students. "He believed very firmly that it was every citizen's responsibility to own a gun and know how to use it."

  Keller didn't respond, and Lanie felt relieved. Even though she had started it, the discussion of their old lives was just too painful. Too many people were dead. If he realized that, maybe they could get along long-term, after all.

  "Do you think the kids came back as zombies too?"

  Lanie shuddered at the thought, and glared at him. "I can still shoot you, you know."

  "Sorry!"

  They completed the inventory in relative silence, and by the time they were done, the urge to shoot him had faded. Her temper no longer felt so frayed either, and she actually laughed when he caught her eye again and made a face.

  "So, about two months' worth of food and water, and some decent survival equipment," she said. "It's better than I thought."

  She didn't mention the boxes of condoms that they had found, but she was glad to see them. There was no way she wanted to get pregnant in this situation, but she wasn't really interested in becoming celibate either. Keller hadn't mentioned them either, though he watched her stack them by the bed.

  "Still not a lot," he said instead. "We're going to need some sort of a plan."

  "Well, we've got the radio now." They had found one of the fancy hand-crank emergency radios in the third supply bin. "I say, let's crank it up and see what's going on in the world outside."

  Keller cranked for a few minutes, then turned it on and started fiddling with the dials. There was nothing but static.

  "The grid might have gone down," he said. "And the emergency generators..."

  Lanie reached past him and turned it off. "Between the bird flu and the zombies, there might not be anyone in a position to turn them on. I think for now, though, we have to assume we're on our own."

  "Yeah." Keller looked depressed. "I mean really, our government couldn't even deal with Hurricane Katrina, so why should we expect them to be able to deal with zombies?"

  Lanie nodded. "The relief shipments were working out pretty well, but those were mostly private efforts. Businesses sending their supplies to the people who could use them, that sort of thing."

  "Mainly employees,
I heard. People who decided to do the right thing even if they didn't technically have the authority. But now..."

  "I know. Now they don't just have disease to worry about. Any time a driver stops for gas, or tries to make a delivery, they're going to get attacked."

  "A lot of people are going to start starving."

  They looked around the bunker with new eyes, suddenly seeing largesse instead of hardship.

  Keller shook his head. "There's no way we can get this to anybody. The truck's out of gas, so we'd be down to what we can carry, and we don't have any way to find other survivors, other than wandering around. We'd just get ourselves killed."

  "I know," Lanie said. "But if we can't share it, we might as well use it. We'll make up two packs, with as many supplies as we can comfortably carry. We set them aside as our go-bags, and we stay here until we've used up all the rest of it. Maybe by then there'll be a signal on the radio, or the zombies will be gone. If not, we still set out, start looking for other survivors, or someplace we can stay longer term."

  Keller was nodding. "It'll be warmer then too. More edible plants to gather, less need for shelter from the weather. I know it's cold in here, but it'd be even worse out in the wind."

  Lanie swung open the door of the wood stove in the corner, peering in. "Does this thing work? I mean, if the zombies have already found us here, we don't need to worry about attracting their attention with the smoke, so we might as well be warm. And all this canned stuff might be more appetizing if we can heat it up."

  "We'd have to go outside for wood..."

  Lanie looked around at the walls, trying to listen for that sense that had warned her of the zombies before. "Do you trust me?" she asked.

  Keller just raised his eyebrows.

  She took a deep breath and turned the deadbolt, then unlocked the door and opened it cautiously.

  They stepped outside, looking around, and Keller made a quick walk around the perimeter of the bunker's little grove. Nothing attacked, so they cautiously started gathering dead branches and building a wood pile.

  "I don't know about you," Lanie said after a little while, "but every time I go out of sight of the door, I get so nervous I have to hurry back."

  "Are you sensing zombies?" Keller straightened, hatchet in hand, and scanned the woods.

  "No... no, I don't think so." She grimaced. "I think it's the fact that it's unlocked. In the city, I never used to leave anything unlocked. Not my car, not my apartment, not even to take the garbage out! It just... makes me uneasy."

  "Well, that's easy enough. We'll just lock it every time we leave."

  "But then what if we're in a hurry when we get back? It took you like five minutes to get the door open the first time, and I didn't see any WD-40 in our inventory."

  Keller was silent for a few minutes, staring at the door and looking around.

  "The wood pile," he said eventually. "We build it up next to the bunker so that we can easily climb up on the roof, and leave the shovel and the broom up there so we can knock it down if zombies try to climb up after us. That way, if we're in a rush and can't get in, we can still get to safety fast."

  "That... works," Lanie said. "I guess. But I think we should store our go-bags and the tent up there too, so that if we do get cornered and the zombies take a while to go away, we still have food and shelter. We can wrap everything in one of the tarps, so it's safe from the weather, and that'll give us a little more space for an inside wood pile, too."

  Building the wood pile tall enough and sturdy enough took three days, during which they both grew more confident of Lanie's ability to sense zombies from a distance. Twice, they stopped work and sheltered inside the bunker when she warned of zombies coming their way.

  Each time, Keller asked her non-stop questions while he watched out the scope - how far away they were, how fast they were moving, how many there were, and their exact direction.

  Answering the questions made Lanie focus her attention on the sense, not just taking a first warning from it, but learning to distinguish details and extend her range. "It's like those old Magic Eye pictures," she told Keller. "At first, there's just a general idea that something's there. Like when you look at the picture you can tell it's there because it's so weird, even if you can't make out what it's supposed to be. Then you get your eyes and your mind just right, and - wham! - it comes into focus. Only I'm bringing lots of different pictures into focus. It's getting easier, though."

  What she didn't tell him was that sometimes she could see other things. Glimpses of forest, like she was seeing through their eyes. Glimpses of other places that might have been their memories, and always that deep, almost elemental rage. Their anger was always the first thing she noticed, and the last thing she lost track of when they were moving away.

  She didn't want Keller to know that she wasn't just detecting zombies, she was touching their minds, or maybe their souls. Especially given how much harder it was to keep her own temper when they were near. She didn't like the feeling that they were touching her mind back.

  Instead, she answered his questions without adding any elaborations, and celebrated the small feeling of control that improving her acuity brought.

  Once the wood pile was built and tested, and their travel supplies stashed on the roof, they started exploring further, trusting in her zombie sense to warn them if they were approaching zombies or in danger of getting cut off from the bunker.

  A week passed, and they grew more confident, both in Lanie's senses and in their ability to survive. Neither of them had any idea of which plants might be edible, but they tried setting snares according to the directions on the package of wire from the bunker, and made improvised maps of the surrounding area. There was a stream nearby, so they had plenty of water to boil, and the wood stove was equipped with a small cooking surface, so when they finally found a fat squirrel in one of their sprung snares, they happily cooked it up into a stew.

  They grew more and more confident, and trekked farther each day, leaving the wood stove burning so that it would keep the bunker warm and be ready for cooking when they returned. They set more snares and spent a good part of each day walking the lines, though for the most part they were re-setting sprung traps.

  "Thank God the animals aren't rising as zombies too," Keller said at one point, while making a mess of gutting a rabbit. "Why do you think that is? Is it some sort of disease after all, that just hasn't crossed the species barrier yet?"

  "It doesn't seem like a disease to me," Lanie said. She hesitated, wondering whether she should tell him about the rage after all.

  Then she felt it. Her head jerked up, her eyes peering intently in the direction of the bunker. Her nostrils flared involuntarily, and she shuddered. "A crowd of them," she said. "Moving... faster than they usually do. We've got to hurry or they'll cut us off."

  She took off through the woods at a careful trot, fingering the key in her pocket and hoping she would have time to use it. Sheltering in the bunker seemed a lot safer than sheltering on top of it.

  Keller was ahead of her when they reached the clearing, but he stopped dead as he rounded the corner of the bunker. She kept going, making a beeline for the door.

  It wasn't there.

  The doorway gaped open and unobstructed, until a big man stepped out through it and caught her in his arms. In a single motion, he stepped behind her and twisted her body into some sort of wrestling hold where she couldn't move, let alone reach her gun to shoot him.

  Keller dropped the rabbit and ran to help her, but another man, small and wiry, came out swinging and knocked him to the ground with one blow. He kicked him, hard, forestalling his effort to get up again.

  "Cooperate," the wiry man said with a big grin, "and nobody gets hurt - too much."

  Three more men came out of the bunker and pulled Keller to his feet, zip-tying his hands behind his back before throwing him to the ground again, hard. One of them grabbed his shoulders and sat him up against the woodpile before leav
ing him there with one more slap, and joining the others who were looking at Lanie.

  She hung limply in her captor's grasp, deathly afraid that if he pushed any harder against her neck it would snap.

  "Ease up a little there, Dent," the wiry man said. "Our hostess is looking mighty uncomfortable."

  "Whatever you say, Jay." The man holding her let go for an instant, but before she could resist, he had her again, holding her upper arms tightly against her body, and holding her up so that she had to stand on her toes. One of the others pulled her gun out of its holster and tucked it into his own waistband.

  Jay stepped closer, tugging her shirt straight, his manic grin making her skin crawl. "So kind of you to get the place ready for us," he said. "Warm house, hot food, soft bed. Oh, we are going to have all sorts of fun tonight!"

  He grabbed her breasts and pushed his mouth against hers, swiping his tongue between her lips before she could think to grit her teeth. She bit down instead, and rocked back against her captor with the force of Jay's punch to her gut.

  He backed off while she gagged, wiping his mouth. "Oh yes, all sorts of fun." He slapped her face, hard enough to knock her head back and set her eyes watering. "Now listen up, because here's the rules."

  The feel of the approaching zombies and her own fury at being attacked by humans - living humans! - fed into each other, echoing and amplifying until she couldn't hear a word the stranger was saying over the roaring in her ears. If only the zombies would be smart this time, surround them so that these fools couldn't flee. It didn't even occur to her that she would be trapped too. All she wanted was to destroy them utterly.

  Then the mass of zombies split, moving into exactly the maneuver she had imagined.