Apocalypse Asunder (16 page)

“You’re the mom.”
Jessica told herself sternly, forcing her own expression to maintain a steady look that was more intense than afraid.  “Calm down.  Breathe.  Stay here, okay?  Stay here and just breathe.  I have to help Austin.”

Candice just kept staring up at her, not even blinking as more tears welled up and spilled down her face.  Jessica bit her lip and tried again.  “Can you do that for me?  Can you stay here and be brave?”

“I’ll try.” Candice whispered.

“Okay.” Jessica said, leaning down and kissing the girl on the forehead, hugging her in tight with so much pressure she expected Candice to squirm in objection.  But Candice just squeezed back.

“Can you do that?  Can you try to keep calm and be brave for me?” Jessica asked with her head right next to the girl’s ear.  Austin grunted loudly, and she heard something wooden splinter and break.  Several loud thumps came next, and he grunted again.

“You’ll make it better?” Candice asked, looking up at Jessica hopefully.

“I promise.  Nosy kisses promise, okay?.” Jessica said, leaning down further so she could rub her nose across the girl’s.  It was wet and slick with tears, smelling of salt and dirt, but she knew it would help settle the girl.  Every advantage was needed right now.

“Okay.” Candice said, her voice scarcely audible.

“Be brave.” Jessica said, pushing Candice back so she could disentangle herself and rise.  Candice scooted back reluctantly, and Jessica flashed a smile she didn’t feel in the slightest before she turned to the door.

“You’re the mom.  Fix it.”
Jessica told herself. 
“Famous last words.”

She went out into the hallway.  Austin had, somehow, converted one of the dresser drawers into a makeshift club.  She couldn’t figure it out, but regardless he had a piece of wood about three feet long in his hand that he was using as a club.  With it, he was beating at the zombies from behind the safe side of the barricade.  They didn’t have the coordination, or inclination apparently, to even try to dodge his blows; but the stairs were so jammed with walking corpses that the club wasn’t making much headway.

Jessica looked around, biting her lip again.  Behind her, she heard Candice whimpering.  Ahead of her, Austin was breathing hard; with a sharp note of wheezing that told he was not just winded, but in pain.

And the club didn’t seem to be carving a swath of destruction through the zombies.  He’d bring it down or sweep it sideways at them, and heads would roll; but the zombies usually came back up and kept pressing forward.  In the moments she watched, she saw one zombie go down as its neck seemed to break under the blow – the creature vanishing as the rest of its brethren trampled up over it – but three others ignored impacts that would send humans reeling in agony.

“Think.  You’re the mom.  Fix this.”
she thought, trying to force her mind to organize and order through the alarm that was tearing at it.  They didn’t have enough bullets to shoot their way out of here.  The area seemed covered in zombies.  Shooting would keep drawing the zombies in.  Austin wasn’t in good shape, Candice might not even be ready to run, and if the big man couldn’t take a zombie out with a club Jessica
sure
as hell knew she probably couldn’t.

She looked around in frustration.  The house was furnished, there were pictures on the wall; people had lived here.  Florida wasn’t quite as ‘redneck’ as Georgia; but it was still a southern state.  Maybe the owners had been gun nuts; maybe there were weapons and ammunition in one of the bedrooms.  Maybe there were things she could use to fashion up a hand weapon, something better than a piece of a dresser.

Austin swung his club again, but he over balanced this time and sagged forward over the barricade.  One of the zombies got a hold on his wrist, and pulled.  Austin grunted as he resisted, flexing his arm to keep his hand away from any of the zombies’ teeth.  Jessica leaned forward in alarm, starting to reach to help him pull himself free, but he pointed the MP5 with his off-hand and fired several single shots.

One of them smashed through the forehead of the zombie who’d seized him, and the thing’s grip went slack.  Staggering backwards, Austin caught himself against the wall and pushed himself fully upright after a moment where he drew one deep breath.  He reached for another of the dresser drawers.

Jessica looked at the bedroom doors.  Beds meant sheets.  Sheets could be tied together.  It was only one story down.  Maybe they could rig up a makeshift rope, hold the barricade long enough to attract all the local zombies inside the house’s first floor.  Then she and Candice and Austin could climb down through one of the windows, and make a run for it.

It wasn’t much, but it was something.  Yeah,
something
was a word alright.  Jessica rolled her eyes at the patheticness of the idea.  As she did, she noticed the hatch in the ceiling at the far end of the hallway.  She frowned slightly, then her eyes widened.  Attic.  Her house in Lawrenceville had a hatch just like that, and it went up into the attic.  Hers had a little cord that hung down, but . . .

“Austin.” she said, turning back to him.  He had a fresh drawer in his hand, and as she watched he slammed it into the head of the closest zombie.  Wood splintered, clothing sort of sprayed out across the zombies, and she began to get an idea of how he’d ‘fashioned’ the last club; beat on zombies until the drawer converted itself into a single stick of wood.

“We stand here, they’re going to keep coming.  They do that, we have to keep defending the barricade or they’ll batter their way through because we’re here.  If they’re trying to get through, we’ll have to keep shooting and fighting and making noise, which means they’ll keep coming, and we have to keep defending the barricade.  They never give up.” he said as he slammed the drawer down again.

“I know.  I have an idea.”

“I’m all ears.” he said as he thrust the drawer forward at a zombie, knocking it over backwards.  Two more pressed forward over the flailing body.

“Attic.” she said, pointing.

He leaned back with the partially disintegrated drawer held up out of the zombies’ reach so they couldn’t pull it from his grip, and looked where she was pointing.

“If we hide, they’ll forget about us.” she said, half hopefully and half certainly.  “We just need a safe place to hide, where they can’t get at us.”

“They can’t reach that.” he said slowly.

“My thoughts exactly.”

“Hold them off while I get it open.” he said, dropping the dresser on the hallway floor behind the barricade.  She stepped back against the wall as he slid sideways past her, reaching up for the door in the ceiling.  He was more than tall enough to reach the hatch; she’d have needed to find something to stand on to get at it.  There was a little hole that let him hook a finger in and pull.  A trap door, hinged and weighted with an extending set of ladder stairs, unfolded down as he tugged.

Back in Atlanta, Jessica had been trapped once before by zombies; chased into a building.  There had been a lot more separation, and fewer zombies; but otherwise it was the same.  After some time, the zombies had given up or forgotten or gotten bored or . . . she didn’t know, but maybe it didn’t matter.  The point was she and Candice had been trapped, then after waiting, the zombies had left, and so had she and her daughter.

It might work again.

It had too.

“It’s clear.” Austin said, standing on the second step and looking around inside the attic.  He stepped back down and gestured at her.  “Come on, it’s clear.”

“Candice, new plan!” Jessica called, moving so she was in front of the bedroom where her daughter huddled.  “Let’s go, get out here.”

Jessica checked Candice again, taking her time about it, until she decided the ten-year-old was definitely asleep.  The girl was curled up on her side, with her head pillowed in her arms.  She hadn’t moved in quite a while, and her breathing was slow and even, so Jessica took that as a sign her daughter was finally out cold.  It was for the best.

Candice had held up so well, even during the initial outbreaks back in Atlanta; but being on foot and chased into a strange house by a horde of hundreds and hundreds of zombies had apparently been the last straw for her.  It had taken everything Jessica could manage to keep the girl quiet, so the zombies weren’t attracted to the ceiling separating them from the attic.  Eventually, thankfully, Candice had eventually cried herself out and fallen off into sleep.

The attic didn’t have much to offer; just some flattened cardboard boxes of various sizes – most of them with markings indicating they’d held appliances and furniture – along with a bunch of old shelves.  And not furniture shelves either; the older style kind Jessica didn’t see a lot these days.  The kind with metal rods that screwed into the wall, then had shelf supports hooked into them so boards could be laid to create usable space.

Candice lay on a lattice grid of the wall rods, with boxes across them to support her.  Jessica had been sitting next to her on a similar setup.  Austin, though, had claimed the thin wooden shelves out of necessity to create a platform that could support his weight.  The problem was the ceiling was thin and flimsy; only the roof rafters could bear any real weight.  Jessica had put a hole through the plasterboard, near the attic trapdoor, learning that.

Cautiously, moving very, very, slowly, she shifted and started crawling her way across the rafter supports toward where Austin waited.  He was stretched out flat on his back, but his head turned almost as soon as she started moving.  She saw his eyes glinting in the fitful amount of moonlight filtering in through the two small windows that were on opposite sides of the house.  Only one of them partially faced the moon’s position, and even it wasn’t letting much light in.

But it was just enough to, barely, see by.  Jessica got close to Austin and carefully settled herself down across a couple of the rafters right next to him.  By sitting on one, with her legs stretched out across the adjacent ones, she could stay off the plasterboard and not have to crouch.

“That doesn’t look that comfortable.” Austin said quietly, gesturing to her position.  He’d already explained to her that whispering had a pitch and tonality that tended to carry; oddly making it less quiet than simply talking in a very low voice.

“Think they’re gone?” she breathed back.

“Maybe.” he shrugged.  “Hard to say unless they’re banging around.”

“Haven’t heard much banging for a while.” she said hopefully.

The zombies had seemed to take quite a while to batter their way through the barricade of furniture she and Austin had created at the top of the stairs.  Then the hungry undead had apparently milled about on the second floor for a couple of hours.  Listening to them pound and bang and break things was nerve wracking.  They bashed at the walls and doors seemingly at random.  There didn’t seem to be any design or rhyme to their ‘search’ of the floor below.

Probably, they didn’t even know or remember why they were up there.  Something had drawn them, obviously, but what it had been eluded the hungry nightmares.  All she knew was nothing hit the attic floor – the second floor ceiling – even once to indicate some industrious zombie had figured out where the three meals-on-feet had disappeared to.  She wasn’t even sure they were trashing or destroying the second floor for any particular reason beyond their usual single-minded inability to do anything except move forward and get physical with anything in their way.

She thought the three of them were probably safe up here, but that didn’t make it any easier to sit and wait to see what happened.  Candice had taken listening to the zombies below very well, and had spent most of the time while the zombies hammered on the blockading furniture at the top of the stairs huddled in Jessica’s arms crying hysterically.  Jessica didn’t blame the girl a bit; nothing about this wasn’t scary.  Tears and fear were warranted.

In some ways she envied her daughter.  Candice had Jessica to lean on, to put all her panic and terror upon; who did Jessica have?  Herself, and Austin.

She missed her mom.

“It could take them a while to lose interest.” he shrugged again.  “And there’s no telling what they’ll do when they forget about us.”

“Will they?” Jessica asked.  She thought the zombies would.  At least, she’d seen it happen before.  Or, she hoped that was what it was.  She was
really
hoping the incident back in Atlanta hadn’t been because something
else
had happened by to draw the zombies away.  If that was the case . . . huddling up here was not going to solve the problem.

“I think so.”

“What if they don’t?”

“Hey, I’m just the muscle.” he grinned, his teeth flashing white in the near dark.  “You’re her Royal Supreme In-Chargeness Extraordinaire.”

Jessica caught herself before she laughed reflexively, settling instead for a smile.  “Well, in that case, I’m asking for suggestions.”

“We see about making some noise outside the house maybe.” Austin said after a moment’s thought.  “Figure out a way to throw stuff out the window or maybe shoot the guns some to create echoes outside that draw them off.  Or we come up with a way to climb down the outside of the house and sneak away.  Or we wait for something to happen that distracts them and make a break for it then.”

“Or we have to fight.” she said when he fell silent.

“Or we fight.” he agreed.  “But let’s give it at least until morning.”

“Not too much past morning though.” Jessica said unhappily.  “Maybe if I’d thought to grab my backpack, but since it’s still in the damn wreck with the rest of our stuff, sometime tomorrow we’re going to have to figure something out.”

“Relax.” Austin said calmly.

“Austin, we don’t have any water.”

“Deep breath.”

“Yesterday was pretty warm.” she said, struggling to keep her voice from rising in frustration and fear.  “I mean, that’s the reason we’re headed south, but it had to be near eighty.  It’s only just now cooling down as it is.”

“Jessica.”

“When the sun comes up,” she went on, ignoring his attempts to break in, “it’s going to heat back up in here.  When it does, without water, we’re going to have a problem.”

“Jessica.”

“We can’t just sit in here for a couple of days waiting for rescue.” she said.

“Jessica!” he said sharply but quietly, pushing himself to a sitting position with a wince as his abused and tender innards protested.

“This is my fault.” she said miserably.

Reaching out, Austin seized hold of her arms just above the wrists and shook them several times.  “Stop it.”

“All we had to do was stay in Georgia, stay in the quiet areas, and none of this would be happening.”

Austin abruptly pulled her toward him.  Her butt had slid along the rafter and was on the shelving boards he’d arranged before she realized what was happening.  He crossed his arms, which crossed hers too since he still had a firm grip on them, and pulled her in close.  It wasn’t a hug – their arms were between them – but she had little choice but to be held face to face with him.  He was far stronger, plus she didn’t want to create noise by trying to fight uselessly.

Or worse, end up falling off the rafters and going right through the ceiling.  Even if there weren’t any zombies down there, she couldn’t imagine a sudden seven or eight foot fall would do her a single bit of good.

“Jessica.” he said very quietly.  “Take a breath.”

“Austin—” she began, but he cut her off by leaning his head in very close to hers.  Very close.  Their foreheads touched, and she could feel his breath on her face.  He rearranged his arms; shifting the right to encircle her waist so she had to stay, while his left hand came up so he could lay two fingers across her lips for a moment.

“Take.  A.  Breath.” he said again.

Jessica looked into his coal black eyes.  They were locked on hers, and even from a distance of only an inch or so, seemed almost depthless, like nothing could ever push them past any limit of what they could hold.  She grabbed at the steady resolve she saw there and closed hers.  Slowly, she drew a deep breath, filling her lungs and letting the inrush of air start chasing away the swirl of panic and doubt and uncertainty within her.

“Let it out, then try another on for size.” Austin said quietly, his words puffing air gently against her skin.  She was reminded of how reassuring she’d always found his presence– feeling his forehead against hers, his arm around her waist – and complied.  She exhaled steadily, letting the air spill out of her in an extended outrush, then breathed in even more slowly.  The fresh air filled her a second time almost of its own accord, chasing away the last bits of panic that were still hanging around.

“Better?”

“Better.” she said, opening her eyes.

He leaned back and relaxed his grip on her waist.  “We’ll figure it out.  That’s what we do, what we’ve been doing, and what we’ll keep doing.”

“Sorry.” she said, suddenly embarrassed.  By her outburst and hysterics, by her needing him to step in so physically to calm her, and – in a rush that surprised her when she realized it – by the thought that she hadn’t bathed in two days, nor brushed her teeth in nearly fifteen hours.  Or even her hair, for that matter, which she was suddenly hyper aware of in its loose tail with strands and locks that had escaped the band to hang about her face and shoulders.

“Sorry.” she said again, sitting back some.  She wanted to reach up to do something about fixing her hair, but that just made her think of how she also hadn’t thought to reapply any deodorant this morning.  Which, she reflected, she
definitely
should’ve done if she was going to skip even the little bit of cleaning a washcloth rubdown could provide.

“It happens.” he said calmly.  “Even to me.”

Jessica caught herself just in time, once again heading off the impulse to laugh and turning it instead into a silent smile.  “No way.”

“Yes way.” he disagreed.  “My second detached patrol as squad leader, me and my guys were pulling security in an urban area.  I was such a busy-body, checking up and asking about every little detail over and over, my lead E-5 finally pulled me aside and asked what was wrong.”

“Sometimes it sucks being in charge.” Jessica said with a sigh.

“Yes, it does.” he agreed.  “And believe you me, as many times as I had when I wanted to lay my CO out for being such a moron, there were
more
where I was glad as hell to have him there to make the decisions.  Even if I didn’t like the ones he made, sometimes it was better to let him make them instead of having to figure shit out on my own.”

Jessica sighed again.  “I just . . . okay, you’re right.”  While it had been something of a point of amusement for Austin, she had put her foot down after Knoxville and decided she was through following.  Sitting around waiting for . . . she didn’t even know what now . . . in Atlanta had come
this close
to getting her and Candice killed.  Then following the Morrises down to Knoxville had come just as close to getting her and Candice . . . well, she wasn’t sure
exactly
what would have happened, but death might have been on the mild side for what could have been in store if the two of them had stuck around at the Eagle facility.

But this was the other side of being in charge.  Refusing to follow meant she had to lead.  And when life was on the line, she was finding those decisions came hard.  And came back even harder.  The little voices of doubt and uncertainty and worry were constantly in her head, challenging and confronting the path she chose.

It was one thing to wonder if maybe not doing a little more scavenging, or checking a few more houses, or maybe looking a little harder for extra containers or whatever would have been a better choice.  That could cost her a few minutes of sleep some times.

But being stranded, on foot, treed in the crawlspace of a sweaty house by zombies, lacking even basic supplies to make standing a siege feasible, wondering if Candice was going to be any calmer when morning came . . .
that
was all driving her half-crazy.

“I’m sorry.” she said again.

“Relax.” he repeated.  “We’re going to get out of this.”

“Got any suggestions?”

“Sleep, for starters.” Austin said.  “It’s been a long day, with a lot of stress and activity.  So I’m going to stretch back out on these boards, and you’re going to go join Candice on the boxes over there, and we’ll both get some sleep.”

“Sounds like a good start.”

“Yup.” he nodded.  “And tomorrow, we’ll wake up and take a good look at what we’re facing.  We’ll make some decisions, and then do the best we can.  But one way or another, you’re
going
to get through this.”

Jessica nodded.  “You’re right.”

“Finally.” he grinned.  “Now rest.  Tomorrow’s going to be a big day.”