In the Dead: Volume 1 (12 page)

“
We were here for a Summer Break trip sponsored by our college,” the kid who’d let them in explained. “When it all went down, we stuck together. Only lost five.”

He grinned in pride and Sam couldn’t really blame him. Those were pretty good odds.

“
What are your plans, Mark?” she asked.

“
Mike,” the kid and Troy said together and Troy smothered a smile.

“
What do you mean?” Mike asked with a confused blink.

Sam put her hands on her hips. “I mean, are you thinking about leaving? Building? Expanding?”

He shrugged. “Um, we’re probably just going to wait it out. Wait until someone comes to get us.”

“
Comes to get you?” Troy repeated with a glance at Sam. “You really think someone is going to save us all?”

Mike blinked like he didn’t understand. “Our parents must be looking for us.”

“
Oh Jesus,” Sam muttered as she paced off away from them for a moment. She didn’t think anyone was so naïve anymore. Even without access to many outsiders and the news they might share, even as kids who were in their late teens or early twenties… they should have known better. After a couple of months of zombie hell… they
should
have known better.

“
Look kid, we’ve been out and about for months,” Troy said, semi-gently. “No one is coming. If you’re staying, it should be because you feel like you’re safe or you have some kind of long term plan.”

Mike smiled, like he knew something they didn’t. “Oh, no. We’ll be fine until things get back to normal. We have a lot of food conserved from the rooms before we locked the upper floors down and from the hotel kitchen. You guys are welcome to stay if you want.”

Troy blinked and Sam’s spine stiffened. They’d been together for a while, but they’d never made any promises to stay together. He wasn’t her boyfriend or anything (despite one heavy make out session a couple weeks back that they hadn’t really ever talked about or repeated). Maybe he was tired to following her from ‘safe place’ to ‘safe place’. She really couldn’t blame him.

“
Thanks,” Troy said and her stomach sank. “But naw. The two of us have our own thing planned.”

He looked at her and smiled. “As long as you can put up with me a while longer.”

She nodded and covered her relief with a shrug. “I guess.”

“
All right.” Mike shrugged. “You guys want to trade before you go?”

“
Sure.” Sam said as she followed him toward the back of the room where supplies were piled up in no particular way or form. She bit her tongue as she pawed through it and offered a bit of what they had.

By the time she was done, Troy was standing by the door, waiting for her. He smiled as she held out a two-liter of his favorite flavor of soda.

“
Sweet.” He reached out and took her hand unexpectedly. She stared at their intertwined fingers as he moved toward the door and the outside world. “So, where’s our next stop? Where’s the next ‘safe place’?”

Sam smiled. “How do you feel about Albuquerque?”

“
Like it’s six hundred miles away?” he laughed.

The kids at the barrier let them out and they let go of hands to raise their weapons as they scanned for zombies.

Sam clicked the remote entry system for the car. “Then it’s settled. We’re going to New Mexico.”

“
Hey Sam?” Troy moved to the driver’s seat and hesitated there.

“
Yeah?”

“
There is a safe place out there. I know it.”

She smiled. “Me too. Now let’s go find it.”

They’re the Lions Now

The line around the August Memorial Zoo stretched into the parking lot. People shifted from foot to foot, talking and laughing as they waited for the gates to open for the day. At 9
AM
exactly, a guard came out and slid the metal bars behind the fake rock walls and motioned the people forward to the payment gates.

Ryan looked at his brother. “Why are we doing this again?”

James stared at him as they inched forward. “Um, because of the new exhibit, asshat.”

A lady behind them glared and shot a meaningful look down to the kid she had strapped into a stroller. James turned his back on her and ignored the daggers shooting from her eyes.

“
Are you really telling me you think it’s going to be worth ten bucks to see this?” Ryan sighed.

James shook his head. Ryan was fourteen and nothing impressed him anymore. Even the Outbreak halfway across the country had been yawn-worthy and though their Mom said it was just his way of coping with the carnage, James wasn’t sure it wasn’t just his younger brother’s annoying way of rebelling against everyone else’s horror.

“
I’m paying, so what do you care?” James asked, a bit more sharply than he had intended. “Look, we’ll check out the new exhibit, maybe take a pass around the lions and the snake house and then we’ll be outie.”

Ryan laughed. “You are such a geek.”

“
You say that like it’s a bad thing,” James said with a shrug. “Geeks end up ruling the world, so I say… bring on the geek.”

“
Go!” Ryan pointed ahead of them. The lady in the booth was motioning them forward.

James paid, grabbed a map and hauled his brother into the big open area that was beyond the gate. There was a souvenir shop, a set of bathrooms and a bigger, wooden version of the map he held in his hand. No one was looking at that stuff, though. Everyone was moving toward the same area.

“
Come on before they all block everything and we can’t see,” James snapped.

Ryan let out a put-upon sigh and followed his brother, sneakers dragging on the ground. James suppressed the urge to smack his brother and abandoned him, hurrying through the crowds of people, dodging the strollers with crying, whining kids.

He hesitated at the archway that said, “Scenes of the Outbreak” in big, red letters. His heart leapt. This was it. What he’d been waiting for over the last six months… ever since the zoo had been renamed as a memorial to the Outbreak of the Summer of 2010 and they’d announced they would be caging and displaying…

“
Zombie!” one of the little kids squealed.

The crowd gathered around a cage gasped and stirred and James sprinted forward. He elbowed his way through the crowd, ignoring the grunts and protests of the people he was running over in his zeal to see…

“
Whoa,” he whispered.

The cage had iron bars and there was an expanse of grass between those bars and the barrier that everyone was currently leaning on. Behind the bars, though, that was the best part.

There were two zombies in the exhibit. A male and a female. Both were dressed in tattered rags, the remnants of what they had once been before the Outbreak.

“
Oh look, this tells us more about them, Timmy,” said a lady a few people down to James’s right. She looked at the metal sign while her kid swung around without a care. “The zombie was created due to an accident in a lab in Washington State. Though it isn’t known when these particular zombies were infected, the state of their clothing suggests some time in the last 8-12 weeks. The male was once a bus driver for the Topeka Kansas transit system. The female appears to have been a traffic cop for the City of Austin, Texas. Zombies are extremely dangerous, so please stay behind the barrier.”

James stared. He had only seen zombies on television. Once the government had realized the Outbreak was out of control, they’d built that Wall in the middle of the country and cut off the infection before it got as far East as Kentucky. For a while, people had been scared. Every night they analyzed the possibility of infection on the news.

But soon, things got back to normal. The news still covered the Outbreak, of course, and there were a few weird reality shows about it. But it was no longer the lead story.

“
Whoa, they are
way
uglier than I thought they would be.”

James jolted and found that his brother had forced his way to the barrier, too. For once Ryan didn’t look bored or jaded. He actually looked impressed.

“
Look at how her cheek is rotting,” James said, pointing at the female zombie. “You can see her teeth through her face!”

“
Gross!”

“
Timmy, get down now.”

James leaned over and looked down. The same woman who had read the description of the zombies out loud to her kid was now checking her cell phone while “Little Timmy”, who looked to be about eight, climbed up on the barriers that blocked them from the cage with the zombies.

“
Jeez!” James grumbled. “Look at that?”

Ryan leaned around him. “Yeah? So what?”

James pursed his lips. “Why don’t people watch their kids? Seriously, the barriers are there for a reason!”

“
God, you are such an old fogy for a guy just out of high school,” his brother laughed.

“
Apocalypses will do that,” James said with a glare for his brother. “Just because you don’t care, doesn’t mean no one else does.”

His brother shrugged. “I care. I just don’t think we’re in an ‘end of days’ type scenario. Not much has changed except no more planning for that vacation at the theme parks in California.”

“
Sick,” James said with a look at his brother. “Just sick, man.”

“
Hey, lady, your kid!” a guy in the crowd cried out and there was a fair amount of panic in his voice.

James and Ryan looked down the way again and to James’s horror, the little boy had managed to sling himself over the barrier and was now on the grass between the wall and the cage of zombies. Worse, it seemed like the zombies saw it, too. They had been pacing aimlessly, but now they rushed the cage, reaching through the bars, drooling black sludge and making a horrible, rasping hiss.

“
Timmy!” the mother cried. She tossed the cell phone she’d been so interested in and vaulted over the barrier.

But Timmy clearly had some experience in escaping his Mom. He was already running toward the cage and he was a quick little bastard. Everyone else just stared, mesmerized and terrified as the mother rushed after him.

“
No!” she squealed and jumped for him with her arms outstretched.

The female zombie caught her wrist and the crowd gasped in unison and leaned forward.

“
Why isn’t anyone stopping this?” James whispered, though he was perfectly aware that he wasn’t any better.

“
Desensitized by seeing zombies on TV,” his brother explained.

The woman screamed again as the female zombie yanked her against the cage. Hard. The little boy flew forward, pinned by his mother’s body as she flailed and pulled against the female zombie. Zombie Lady bit down on the woman’s hand and there was a horrible spurt of blood as she tore a hunk of flesh away.

Meanwhile, the male zombie rushed the cage and bit the little boy through the bars.

“
Get help!” someone in the crowd yelled and that seemed to wake everyone up. A few people started running, yelling for the zookeepers to come.

James stood frozen in his place, staring as the zombies tore and bit their victims. This was just like he’d seen on the news during the first few days of the Outbreak. Only it was just a few feet away.

“
Um, James?”

He ignored his brother, still mesmerized by the carnage playing out before him.

“
James?” When he still didn’t move, Ryan grabbed him and shook him. “Jamie!”

James shook his head and looked down at his brother. “What?”

Ryan blinked and he actually looked scared. Really scared, not ‘annoyed teenager who knew everything’.

“
When they get bitten, they turn into zombies,” his brother said, voice shaking.

James nodded. “Yeah.”

“
So that means those two will be zombies sometime in the next few minutes.”

“
Yeah.”

James actually felt badly for them as he looked. The woman had stopped screaming and gone limp. The little boy was also down and the male zombie had disconnected his arm and was now shaking it like an angry dog.

“
There’s no gate separating us from them, James,” Ryan said. He grabbed James and shook him again. “Jamie, when they wake up, they’re coming for more people. We have to run.”

The words sunk in. “Shit, you’re right!” James said and he looked around them.

Everyone else in the crowd was too shocked to have made his brother’s very intelligent leap of logic. Part of James said that he should remind them of Ryan’s observation and get them moving for the gates.

The other part knew that would cause a stampede and that he and Ryan could get separated, trampled or zombie-fied in the process.

“
Stay cool,” he whispered. “And stay close. Let’s go.”

His brother nodded slightly and James felt Ryan’s fist close on the back of his shirt as they started moving through the crowd. He breathed a sigh of relief. At least if Ryan held his shirt, they wouldn’t get separated.

If he lost Ryan, his Mom would kill him. Not to mention that he’d probably miss the little creep.

They moved through the crowd, which had more than doubled since James had gotten there earlier. They were stirring and screaming and moving to fill in any space and get a better look at an unscheduled live feeding of the new zombies in exhibit.