Days With The Undead (Book 1) (14 page)

What they thought their plan was going to accomplish, we couldn’t figure out. Flaming corpses are still mobile ones… At some point they must have come across at least one of the Undead to have learnt that. It’s possible though that the stress of the situation has just gotten to them.

Stress is the culmination of your trials and tribulations. The trials and tribulations that we’ve had to endure are plentiful. Nothing could have ever prepared us for the stress on the world ending. Sure, we all had different stresses in our lives before all of this but it was nothing compared to what we were currently experiencing. The effect it had on our bodies was exhausting. Even when we slept, we never really slept soundly. Always having to be aware of your current circumstances easily took years off of the end of your life. I felt so much older than my thirty-four years.

Before the apocalypse, I would have described myself as a vibrant, cheerful woman full of the life I lived. I had tonnes of friends, spent time going to the theatre and seeing live music. Steve and I had even been thinking about starting a family. All of those things were priorities in my life. Of course, I had trained and studied like the rest if the group, but when I say that none of us actually believed this was actually going to happen, I really meant it.

Now that we’re on the move, priorities have changed. All we think about are food, clean water, gasoline and the Undead. Actually, that’s not entirely true… I would give anything to have a hot shower right now. Maybe that would help to relieve some of the stress I feel. Maybe.

And it’s obvious that the stress is getting to me because here I am making excuses for seven men that likely would have tried to kill us just to prove they could. In fact it’s chilling when you realize that those men could have killed us. I guess that in the backs of our minds we had always thought the possibility of pirates had existed, we just assumed that any survivors would have been more concerned with the Undead to actually harm anyone else.

I guess that in the event of an Apocalypse, no one can really be trusted…

That’s the horrible and debilitating effect of stress. It changes people. Look at the people of Minden. Look at the people that were protesting the Undead in Oklahoma. How many hundreds, thousands, even hundreds of thousands of people have lost their lives because they didn’t react or because they reacted in the wrong way? It’s sad, sickening, and utterly exhaustive to even think about now. All that we can concentrate on is getting to the coast and taking it from there. Anything further than that is asking too much at this point.

The news on the Internet is getting bleaker by the day. It’s emotionally draining to sit and watch the YouTube videos of attacks and views from people’s windows. The scared, slobbering video blogs are a definite no-go. I refuse to watch anyone who refused to help themselves.

While I realize that I may have planned ahead to a certain extent, my group and I never thought that this day would actually happen. Who are we all kidding? Dead is dead. At least that is how it’s supposed to work, and trust me I know all about the dead. Even now, I can hear my husband in my head telling me that you should never underestimate the one thing you think you know best… God, I miss him, but I can’t even allow myself that moment of melancholy. Not now. Once I’ve survived, once I’m safe, I’ll have all the time in the world for tears. I can deal with it all then.

Driving up the coast was fairly uneventful. We barely passed any of the Undead. And there did not seem to be any ships or boats anchored off shore up here. In fact, the state of Oregon seemed strangely devoid of everything. No cars left abandoned on the road and the coastal towns and cities still looked somewhat idyllic. Just the odd, singular Undead marring the perfect vista. That and the lack of smiling, happy, thriving,
living
people.

The drive was so easy and the terrain so unproblematic to navigate, we all began to relax just a little bit. We all knew that it wasn’t over, that we still had many more hard days and even harder nights ahead of us, but if God granted us an easier time today we were going to do our best to de-stress and perhaps regain a little of our humanity. Like a bunch of silly kids on a family road trip, we decided to play I-Spy.

As a kid, I could play this game for hours with my brothers; sitting in the back of the van, trying to make them guess a landmark or something-or-other that had passed minutes before. Now, the game was a little harder. Now we were still keeping an eye out for the Undead, for any speeding cars coming at us, and for any cars that may be blocking the road ahead of us. It made the game a little more difficult, but it actually helped us to unwind a little more.

Ben played the dirtiest though… I don’t know if it comes from the fact that he didn’t grow up in a traditional family setting or if he just doesn’t get that the game is designed to be fun. While he made the game interesting, he had a nasty habit of picking things that had just passed so you really had to be on the lookout when it was his turn.

That’s when I happened to notice the vehicle on the road behind us.

It was keeping a very safe distance. If I hadn’t been looking as intently as I was, I probably would have missed it because at this point it was barely a speck on the road. Nevertheless, you could tell that the speck was moving in time with us. Too far back for us to make out any detail with the binoculars in a moving car.

How long had they been back there? Were they following us or just happened to be on the same road at the same exact moment as us? My next thought was that it was the pirates from Eureka, come to exact revenge for killing their friends and escaping. That was a sobering thought. If that was the case, these guys were much crazier than we had anticipated and we were going to have to do something to get rid of them.

I just hoped that we weren’t going to need to resort to violence to end this chase. I’m not above it, mind you, but I would rather not waste the ammunition if I don’t have to.

That was something we had discussed for long hours before the Apocalypse. What were we prepared to do in the event that a living person was standing in your way of survival? My answer had always been the difficult one, filled with conditions and alternate possibilities. I had been the only one to really feel that each situation would need to be evaluated based on what was going on at the time. Perhaps the people trying to do us harm were only trying to protect themselves, just as we were trying to protect ourselves. I always argued that I wouldn’t really know what I would do unless I was actually in the situation.

Now I can emphatically state that I would kill those men from Eureka if given the chance. No questions asked and no doubt about it. You try to do me harm in a world that is so fucking dangerous at the moment and you will pay with your own life.

At this point, it’s too dangerous for us to try and find a sea-faring vessel. We just don’t know what those men are capable of. I’m making the assumption that they were all men. Since they wore masks and heavy equipment, I have no way to tell for sure.

Even worse is that we need to get some gasoline and soon. We’ve only got a quarter of a tank left from the last time we filled up and there’s no telling when we will come across a gas station again. The consensus among the four of us is to get the gas at the next station or in the next town, provided that there isn’t a huge presence of the Undead.

Running out of fuel isn’t going to do us any good, especially if the vehicle coming up behind us is full of men up to no good. And if we were going to try and make a run for it we’ll need all the power we can get. A dry tank wouldn’t help us there either.

We’re coming up on a little town called Kernville. Time to get ready to pump some gas. Wish us luck…

Day 22:

On a normal day with the Undead, getting fuel is a highly choreographed dance of precision with lots of guns. The urgency of being pursued by the Undead and now the unknown didn’t alter that dance but it certainly put the choreography off just a bit.

When we pulled into the Shell station in Kernville we were relieved to see that there were no Undead milling about. The disadvantage to not being able to take things slowly and cautiously observe any given gas station from afar meant that we might drive right into a situation rife with walking corpses. And when you’re fuelling up, that’s the last thing you want popping up behind you.

We took the outside pump as usual and waited a few moments to see if any of the Undead would put in an appearance. Knowing that we couldn’t spare much time, Ben, Max and I got out with our guns cocked and ready. Bob blew the horn to the car; a few moments too late if you ask me. He could have done this while we were still in the safety of the car!

Even the resonating sound of the Escalade’s horn made us all jump and look back up the road, thinking that the other vehicle had already caught up with us. Looking back at the attached store we were relieved to see that it was empty. None of the Undead had stumbled or crawled their way out to greet us.

Cautiously I went inside with Ben to turn on the pump. After flicking the switch, we gathered up a few needed supplies, mainly protein bars and water and turned to head back out to the car.

That’s when I heard the noise.

It was a small whimper, like a puppy or a small animal, and it was coming from the back of the store. I motioned to Ben to follow me for a moment. I felt relatively safe in my knowledge that the Undead did not make sounds like that.

On the back wall of the store was a single restroom; the door covered in the bloody hand print slime you can only attribute to the Undead. The whimpering was coming from the other side of that door. I tentatively tried the door handle, hoping that it wasn’t unlocked. That whomever had gotten into that little room had enough sense to lock it behind them. The door was locked and with the quiet noise the turning of the door handle had made, the whimpering went silent.

Without wanting to seem heartless, I did have a moment where I almost turned around and left what I assumed was a small child locked in that bathroom. In the end, I couldn’t leave. I called out softly through the door, stating that we were there to help and that if they wanted to come out, they were welcome to come with us. I know we didn’t have a lot of time and I could hear the engine of the Escalade already as it had pulled in to the closest pump after filling the tank.

Tentatively the door to the washroom opened and two pairs of innocent little eyes looked up at me. The must have been fraternal twins: one boy, one girl, maybe four or five years old with reddish curls and the most adorable freckles. They were filthy and looked ravenous.

The humanity in me couldn’t leave them here, not after finding them alive in a washroom after God knows how many days. I scooped up the children and started back toward the SUV as Ben disappeared back into the store. He returned moments later with a few cartons of milk, still cold and not expired, thankfully, and some Lunchables he’d found in the refrigerated section. Bob and Max just looked at the kids and then looked at us, accepting the fact that we now had two charges to care for.

After buckling the children in between Max and Ben, we got back out on the road and hurried north again. The children devoured the cheese, luncheon meat, and crackers as if they had never had anything to eat before and drank the milk like they were dying of thirst. We didn’t want to give them too much too fast for fear that we would cause them to vomit or give them stomach pain.

We had no way of knowing how long the two of them had been locked inside that bathroom. No way of knowing how they had been without food. The bathroom had a tap so at least they could have had something to drink, dependent on whether or not they could reach the knobs. They were a little on the smallish side but children tend to be very resourceful in a pinch.

Thank God for Ben; being a doctor, he seemed to know just how much to give them without it being too much. And he was able to check them over for bites while they ate; something I should have done before bringing them along with us.

Once fed, the little girl, whose name we learned was Lily, started to talk non-stop. She told us about how her brother and she happened to end up in that bathroom. It was a story that was believable only from the standpoint that we knew there was no reason for her to have made it up.

They had come home from school with their older sister Sara. Lily remembers that things in their town had been very busy and since school had ended early, they were in high spirits despite the commotion in town. She remembers that Sara had hurried them through town and down their street to their house. She ushered them inside, telling them that they had to find Mom.

Lily told us that her Mom had met them in the front hallway but that there was something wrong with her. She seemed very angry and grabbed onto Sara. She recalls the scream that Sara let out. Putting her hands over her ears, she ran to the back of the house with Liam right behind her. She had wanted a snack but because their mother was being mean, she knew that she would have to grab it before their mother could direct her anger at them.

Before she could open the cupboard, Mommy was at the door to the kitchen with Sara, now just as angry behind her. Not quite understanding what was going on, the two of them froze.

When their mother and Sara came into the kitchen, the granite and walnut island physically separating them, they got their first good look at them. Both of them were covered in blood, similar to the time that Liam had put his hand through the glass on the front door and had to be taken to hospital.

Knowing that something was not intrinsically right with the situation, they avoided both their Mom and Sara and shot out through the back door instead. They ran through the yard with their Undead mother and sister right on their heels.

They dodged Mrs. Carmichael from across the road, who also appeared to be very angry and looked as if she had been hurt; she was missing an arm, after all. They ran down the road and were also almost captured by Rich, the mailman. His face looked funny to them, but they knew that no one running after them was safe to trust.