“Oh, hey,” Nicole said. “Tell me you got some sleep?”
“More than I need,” Olivia said, pouring coffee from the battered pot into mugs which bore the legend of her one-time employer, Wall-to-Wall Carpets.
“Thank you, Lisa Kempton,” Nicole said, taking the mug.
“Thank Mrs Mathers,” Olivia said. “She paid for this coffee.”
“As long as it’s free, I’ll say thank you to the world,” Nicole said.
The mugs, coffee, and the coffee machine had been liberated from the break-room at the carpet store where Olivia had worked, which Lisa Kempton had purchased, and which was currently being torn apart and rebuilt. The banner Olivia and Pete had hung across the parking lot outside hadn’t been lying; everything must go, including everything in the staff break-room. They’d had a raffle of sorts, with everyone getting something. Everyone except Pete, of course.
“So, spill,” Nicole said. “How many times have you checked your phone this morning?”
“Not once,” Olivia said.
“No. Seriously?”
“Seriously,” Olivia said. Out of reflex, her hand strayed towards the kitchen drawer, but she raised it instead. “And I’m not going to check it now. Was there anything in the news?”
“One thing, actually,” Nicole said. “A state senator got a DUI. On a beach. In a hearse. Which was occupied. With a coffin.”
“Wow. One of our state senators?” Olivia asked.
“Kansas.”
“What beach?”
“In Florida.”
“Ah.”
“Which means there’s a job vacancy,” Nicole said. “Or there soon will be.”
“I don’t think I’m qualified,” Olivia said.
“Have you ever taken a hearse on a joy-ride?” Nicole asked.
“Maybe not, but I don’t live in Kansas,” Olivia said.
“But if you’re going to move anyway,” Nicole said, and left the thought dangling. She decanted the rest of her coffee into an insulated mug. “My shift finishes around twelve. We’ll go out this afternoon, take a drive, and say goodbye to Indiana. So make a decision before then.” She tapped the notepad Olivia had left on the counter the night before. “Remember, if you’re leaving, I’m leaving. Kansas could be nice, but moving to Chicago could be fun.”
“If it is Chicago. Don’t quit yet,” she said.
Nicole grinned. “Not until I’ve finished shopping. I’ll see you later.”
Alone, Olivia took the notepad and her coffee over to the couch. The TV went on, but after a minute listening to the anchors mull over aerial footage of a hearse bogged down on a sandy beach, she muted the sound.
Her dilemma, her two-decades-too-early mid-life crisis, had a name: Pete Guinn. She liked him. She did. He was the right mix of funny and serious. Not too stubborn or opinionated. If he had one fault it was that he was a little slow on the uptake, but she’d known him for two years and couldn’t find anything worse to say about him. No, if she were looking for one word to describe him, it would be decent, and she’d been on enough bad dates to know that wasn’t as common as paperbacks made out. She’d probably have asked him out a year ago, except she’d planned to leave South Bend until she got the year’s free rent. And over this last year, they’d grown simpatico. She’d spent a week searching for an aptly descriptive word. And during that week’s exploration of the dictionary, and her own feelings, she’d realised that maybe there could be something deeper between her and Pete.
She’d been about to ask him out when Mrs Mathers had announced she was selling the store. The shrapnel from that bombshell was still pattering down when Pete had received his out-of-the-blue promotion to regional manager in Lisa Kempton’s organisation.
It changed everything. Pete was now her boss. Since opportunities like the six-figure promotion rarely fell into anyone’s lap, if they dated and it didn’t work out, she’d have to quit. If they never dated, she’d have to quit anyway because seeing Pete drive up to the carpet store in his fancy car, wearing his increasingly fancy suits, would just be too much of a reminder of the life she didn’t have. Either way, she couldn’t stay working for Lisa Kempton. It was a shame since the pay was good, and the benefits far better than anything Mrs Mathers had been able to afford. But her mind was made up.
That left the dilemma of dating. It almost certainly wasn’t going to work. Not now. Not with Pete starting a new job with a ton of training and even more responsibilities. Right now he was training in Hawaii, for heaven’s sake. His circles were already infinitely wider than those she travelled in. But she’d give it a go. More than that, she’d make a real effort. Pete, stunned by the sheer number of zeroes in his paycheck, hadn’t realised he wouldn’t be based in South Bend. Ms Kempton didn’t have a corporate office here. Quite why she wanted the carpet store in the first place was still a mystery, but Pete would be working out of Chicago, Detroit, or Cleveland. But not South Bend.
Wherever it was, Olivia would go. She wasn’t following Pete, not exactly, but she was willing to put everything she had into this. Give it one huge try. And when it didn’t work out? She looked at the notepad. Without a degree, her options weren’t great. What made it deeply frustrating was that Ms Kempton would pay the part-time college tuition for any employee without a bachelor’s, but only after two years’ employment.
She hated retail. Her reaction to hospitality was hostility. Warehousing was a killer, and after she’d seen a fifty-year-old co-worker die on the stockroom floor, she’d promised herself never to do that again. Policing? In Chicago, she might be safer joining the army, but she’d rather not do either. Nor nursing. Funeral home was on the list, a late-night addition while they were browsing horror movies, but, again, she’d be starting at the bottom. No one within a hundred miles wanted a manager for a carpet store. Which left the first thing she’d written on the pad, the very first full-time job she’d had at nearly eighteen, ten years before: working in a care home. Hopefully as a manager this time, thanks to her experience and a reference from Mrs Mathers. But there was a reason she’d opted for a carpet store in South Bend.
She dropped the notepad. Until Pete returned from Hawaii, it was impossible to plan too far ahead.
Finally cracking, she got up, walked to the kitchen, opened the drawer, and checked her phone. He still hadn’t called. Of course he hadn’t. No matter how gruelling the training course was, he was on an all-expenses-paid-by-a-billionaire trip of a lifetime to Hawaii. She put the phone back in the drawer and returned to the TV, switching to the show she’d been streaming the night before, trying to lose herself in the mystery of vampire murders.
Nicole had decided she was coming with her. Which was… probably a good thing. Probably.
Olivia had moved to South Bend three years ago, picking the city because she knew nothing about it, and no one who lived there. After a few months packing boxes, a few more waiting tables, and a few less stocking shelves, she’d met Nicole and landed the job at Mrs Mathers’s carpet store, all in the same week. Olivia had been planning on leaving the city anyway, getting restless the closer she got to thirty. She was loath to admit it, but half the reason she’d stayed was Pete. The other half was the free rent, but that stopped in another six weeks.
What if Pete didn’t want to date? Or what if the first one was an utter disaster? What if she didn’t have to go to Chicago or wherever? What then? Where then? Like Nicole said, there were plenty of care homes in Florida. And in Florida, they had someone with whom they could stay.
The show she was watching made no sense. The premise was intriguing, sure, but the principal character, the vampire cop, couldn’t go out in daylight. The interviews and investigation had to take place at night, so the crime scenes had to be somewhere open after dark, and which jewellery store did that? But the sunrise-scenery was spectacular, and she liked the small-town vibe. Maybe that was the answer, to stop worrying about the job, and think more about quality of life.
She watched to the e
nd of the episode, and the beginning of another, but when the show began buffering, she paused it, and headed for the shower. She was overdue for her morning run, but she deserved a day off.
Studiously ignoring her phone, she made more coffee and returned to the couch. The show was still buffering. Frustrated, she stood, and went to the kitchen drawer, and found her phone had gone crazy with insanely impossible notifications.
Outbreak in Manhattan was replaced by Viral Outbreak, and then by Chaos in New York.
Assuming the worst, and that her phone had been hacked, she tapped the news app. Half the photos refused to load, and nor would the first story she clicked on. Nor the second. After the third failed attempt, she scanned the headlines, scrolling down until she reached a page of familiarly benign entertainment news. Those stories wouldn’t load either.
Phone in hand, she returned to the couch and switched to network TV. The screen filled with a sweating anchor who failed to remain calm as he stuttered through a handwritten note. What he was saying wasn’t much more than she’d read on the phone. There’d been an outbreak in Manhattan. Something viral. Something that was spreading quickly. People had died. But how many? How likely was it to spread to South Bend?
Getting frustrated with his slow and stumbling delivery, she switched channels and found herself watching a horror film. A blood-soaked woman in a business suit tore at the flesh of a runner. Except then it cut back to a news studio.
The anchor’s words washed over her as another clip began. She picked up her phone, and finally the story loaded. It had little to add to what the anchor was saying, and included an embedded clip that appeared to be a lower-res version of the same footage the TV was broadcasting. A woman in a business suit staggered out of a café, covered in blood. She collapsed to the sidewalk. A runner stopped to help her, but then she attacked. Biting. Clawing. Tearing at his flesh. Almost as if she was eating— No.
Olivia dropped the phone, returning to the semi-sanitised coverage on the TV. One clip replaced another. One anchor replaced another. Slowly, order was restored. The broadcasters were calmer, the clips more professionally edited. The tone was more reassuring; oddly so for the usually strident news channels. But there was no comfort in the message. People in New York were attacking one another. Killing one another. And no one knew why.
One hand on the remote flipped through the channels. The other scrolled up on her phone, then down through the cascade of new news, searching for confirmation that the outbreak was confined to the East Coast. She didn’t find it. There was very little real information at all. The networks had the same selection of clips, uploaded by citizen journalists, culled from blogs and social media.
It was like a horror film, but far worse. She skipped from a train station to a busy road intersection to a shopping mall somewhere upstate; it was always the same nightmare repeated against a different background. Someone covered in blood fell out of a doorway or reared up from a car, tearing and ripping at a passing civilian.
But finally, on her phone, she found a clip of police setting up a hasty barricade. Her shoulders dropped, releasing a surge of pent-up tension as the clip played, showing the cops corralling civilians into pushing stalled cars into a line across the road. A police officer suddenly fell, dropping her sidearm as she was tugged under a car. The civilians near her stepped back as the fallen officer’s mouth opened in a silent scream. Grateful there was no sound to the clip, Olivia still couldn’t tear her eyes away. But whoever was operating the camera felt differently. The image shook and blurred as they ran back a few yards before, again, it focused on the car and the now unmoving cop. Another officer, gun raised, ran forward, grabbed her collar, and dragged her clear. Her foot was missing. Her leg now ended in a bloody stump. Except she wasn’t dead. Only a few feet clear of the car, having left a bloody smear behind her, she rolled onto her side. The rescuing officer dropped to his knees, bending over her to apply a tourniquet. She reached up, gripping his shoulders. Not to speak. Not to plead. Not to beg for help, or cry out in pain, but to rip and bite at his neck. The clip stopped.
Olivia stared at her phone, then the TV, her eyes slow to focus on the footage of a shopping mall, but she’d seen that clip before. She changed the channel, and found an image of the train station. She leaned forward, watching a few seconds, then skipped to the next channel, the next, skipping more quickly when she found a shopping channel still hawking paste-jewellery. But as far as she could tell, despite the many different angles and varying quality, there were only five, perhaps six, different incidents.
She picked up her phone, reopening the news app, seeing if anything would load. Perhaps it wasn’t as bad as the news anchors were making out. They were so used to portraying every minor crisis as the end of the world, that now, when it might actually be really happening, they’d gone into meltdown. An outbreak? Yes. A terrible one? Yes. But surely it could be contained. Right?
She pressed the remote, flicking to the next channel, and saw the cop die again. Yes, maybe it wasn’t so bad. Or, a voice in her head said, maybe only six people were stupid enough to record video rather than run. Either way, there was no getting around what to call it. The news feed already was. The headline on the lead article read Zombies in New York.
Morning came and midday went, but it was nearly two when Olivia realised Nicole hadn’t returned. She wrote a text and went back to the news app, but it was the same footage as before, so she returned to the text-app to see why Nicole hadn’t replied. Nicole always replied. Despite company policy, she always kept her phone on her, even when she was working the register, which was why she’d been relegated to morning-openings and stockroom duty. The message hadn’t sent. Olivia tried messaging through all the social media apps that Nicole used, but still nothing. In desperation, she tried the rarely used green phone icon. The call didn’t connect. Frustrated, she slumped back against the couch, her eyes on the TV where the footage had, finally, changed.
Shaky phone footage had been replaced with aerial shots filmed from news choppers. She left the volume on mute. What the reporters had to say didn’t matter. Nor did the slowly repeating words at the bottom of the screen. The stock market had closed, as had airports and bridges, but it didn’t tell her which airports and bridges. What she wanted to see on the screen was the National Guard being deployed to New York. But so far, in all the pictures, there were police and an occasional civilian or fire-crew roadblock, but nothing else.
A quick and late lunch later, nothing had changed. She still couldn’t get through to Nicole. The military were still absent from the footage on TV. Her phone’s connection was still erratic. She went to the window to watch the street. It was oddly empty. Eerily so. No delivery trucks rushed by, no soccer-mom SUVs battled school buses heading in the opposite direction. It was too early for commuters, but not too late for shoppers, except there was no one. No, there, a pedestrian hurried along the sidewalk, hand buried deep inside his coat, eyes darting left and right. He turned a corner and was lost from view. A moment later a gunshot rang out, muffled by the window’s insulation, but still distinct.
Olivia moved away from the window, retreating behind the kitchen island. The best thing to do was to stay put. Stay inside. And wait for normality to return.
Chapter 2 - Old Dates and Dead Friends
Waterside Drive, South Bend
Olivia jumped awake and to her feet, momentarily uncertain what had been a nightmare and what was reality. That was forgotten as she looked beyond the patched couch to the opening apartment door. For a second, it swung inwards on its own, then two men came in, one carrying the other.
“Who the hell are—” she began, before Nicole entered behind them.
“Help me, Livy,” Nicole said.
“What’s going on?” Olivia asked. “Is that…” But not only did she recognise the tall man being half-carried, she’d been on a date with him. “Dante Regan? Is that you?”
“Help him,” the other man said, while Dante barely gro
aned.
“Dante was shot,” Nicole said.
“Over here, get him onto the couch,” Olivia said, switching to automatic, and slipping to the injured man’s other side, helping him lower Dante to the couch. “Dante?” she said. “It’s going to be okay. What happened? Why didn’t you take him to the emergency room?”
“It’s a nightmare out there, Livy,” Nicole said. “Didn’t you see the news?”
“Manhattan, you mean?” Olivia asked. “The virus?”
“Zombies,” Nicole said. “It’s zombies.”
“That’s what happened to Dante?” Olivia asked, taking a step back.
“No. Some people tried robbing the grocery store,” Nicole said.
Olivia unbuttoned Dante’s sodden shirt. “Get the first-aid kit from under the sink. And get some towels and some linen.”
She found the wound easily enough, beneath a drenched bandage. Lodged dangerously in Dante’s waistband was a Smith and Wesson 9mm. She withdrew it, carefully, with two fingers. “Why does he have a gun?” she asked, holding it up.
“Why does anyone?” Nicole said, taking the gun and handing her the first-aid kit.
It didn’t take long for Olivia to do all she could, which wasn’t much. “I’m not a doctor,” she said, standing.
“She said you worked in a hospital,” the as-yet-unidentified man said.
“Who are you? Who is this, Nicky?”
“Morgan Mack,” Nicole said.
“This is Morgan Mack?” Olivia asked. “Oh.”
“What’s that mean?” Mack asked.
“Nothing,” Olivia said. Now certainly wasn’t the time for her to share the horror stories Nicole had told her about the stockroom supervisor. “I worked in a care home. It was years ago, and I just handed out Jell-O and changed bedpans. That’s not the same as nursing, let alone surgery, and that’s what Dante needs. Try 911.”
Surviving The Evacuation | Life Goes On (Book 2): No More News Page 2
