LEFT ALIVE (Zombie series Box Set): Books 1-6 of the Post-apocalyptic zombie action and adventure series (53 page)

They set me on some kind of table and before I know it, someone is hugging me. I turn my head a little and take in a deep breath. Whoever is hugging me is sobbing hysterically, and as I breathe in the scent of the person who is holding me, I recognize it instantly. “Val,” I mutter through bloody lips. “Val, my baby. Val, I’ve missed you so much.”

“Daddy, you made it.” She leans back and I look into that precious, angelic face that I remember from the first time I held her. My heart is breaking. I can feel it. It’s shattering into a thousand broken shards and all the blood is flooding out. I am dying, but I am here. I have made it. “Daddy, I love you so much.”

“I know,” I smile faintly. “I love you too.”

“Daddy, it’s going to be alright,” Lexi speaks up as others are tearing at my clothes. They’re ripping at my shirt and trying to get to the bullet hole. They need pliers. They need lighter fluid. “Daddy, you’re going to be just fine.”

“Lexi, Val,” I push the hands away weakly. “My pack. There’s a map. Go to Dayton. Go to Jason’s house.” They look at me with tears running down their cheeks. Lexi is holding my ruined stump, glancing from it to me. I love them so much. I hold Val’s hand tightly, making sure that they hear me. They look at me with sad, horrified faces that this is what it’s come to. “Get everyone and go. Go to Dayton, find Jason’s house. He knew how to save us. He knew how to save the world. Girls, don’t give up. Save the world. You can do it.”

“Dayton, Daddy,” Val nods encouragingly, tears flowing down her cheeks as she leans in and kisses my cheek. “I love you, Daddy.”

“I love you both,” I tell them. “I loved you more than anything.”

“I love you, Dad.” Lexi leans in and kisses my forehead.

I can feel death. The real death. The elusive bastard is near. I can feel God. I can feel whatever it is that controls the cosmos and the universe. I don’t care anymore. I don’t hate him or her or it. All I know is that I made it. I got to see my girls one last time before the end. I got to see them and hold their hands. I got to tell them about Dayton and Jason. God, I hope that they make it. I hope that they find the house and save the world. The world needs them. I look at their sweet, distraught faces again. I cannot imagine the sorrow and the despair. What have I done to them? I have shown up with enough food and gas to take them anywhere, only to die on their doorstep. I look at their darkening faces one last time, taking them in, drinking them in. They are so precious to me. So beautiful. They were worth every last agonizing second. They were worth it all. They were worth the years of loneliness and sadness. They were worth the march across the wasteland. They were worth the lives I’ve taken. If that earns me a place in hell, then so be it. But I don’t think God works like that. I don’t think he’s an asshole. I close my eyes.

Tiffany.

I’m home.

-End

Book Four

A relic from a world we all thought was gone lay bleeding on my dining room table, dying slowly from the bullet hole in his stomach. His eyes looked up at the ceiling, blinking and letting the emotion fade with every second. Honestly, I don’t know exactly what he saw. I don’t think anyone knows what the dying truly see.

I look at him, praying that sheer willpower is enough to keep the soul from leaving the body. I squeeze his hand, looking at his face, the face that looks like a grotesque caricature of the man I knew and loved so dearly. Everything had changed and for a second, everything was normal again. Seeing him had been enough for all the darkness to strip back and the memories to become something more than absent thoughts, but tangible, real again. His grip is fading and I feel all that hope, all that love, slipping with him.

As his hand falls from mine, my father dies, for the second time in less than a year.

Devon doesn’t give up. I don’t know what he’s trying to do, but CPR won’t do a thing for a bullet wound to the stomach. I feel helpless. I feel like everything I’ve learned has left me right here to feel the sting of helplessness at its most bitter moment. Three years training to be a veterinarian. Three years of learning how to save lives and I’m left without a single thing to help my father.

It’s hell, standing here, watching Devon frantically trying to breathe life into a man who is already dead. Skye has her hands clamped down on my father’s stomach, where the bullet wound has slowed its relentless bleeding. I look at him, not sure how I’m supposed to feel right now. How am I supposed to feel about seeing a dead man? How am I supposed to feel about watching a dead man die again?

“I’m so sorry,” Henry whispers again and again. “I’m so sorry, girls. I’m sorry. Oh God, please forgive me. Please, forgive me. I’m so sorry.”

I barely hear a word that he’s saying. I barely hear anything other than my own pounding heart. It’s not fast, just powerful. Each thump resonates inside of me as I look at my father’s face. It’s not the face I remember. It’s not the smiling, strong, happy face that I used to remember. The quiet sadness in his eyes is gone. It’s dried up, evaporated. Everything about him is gone. I look at him, trying to remember what it was he’d said.

“I’m sorry, girls,” Henry cries again.

There’s blood all over the table. Henry didn’t put a bullet in him. He put a bullet through him. My father was a dead man before he even slammed into the side of his truck, before he even felt the bullet pass through him. I look across the room, at the other side of the table where Lexi is dealing with the situation the same way she deals with every situation. I can barely hear her screams, her shrieking in rage as she fights against Noah who has his arms wrapped around her, holding her back.

There’s blood all over her hands, smeared across her face as she screams for our father to wake up, to open his eyes. I’m suddenly very aware of how cold I feel, of the drying blood on my hands. It hits me that this is the blood of my father. This is my father’s blood all over my hands. I blink and suddenly I’m hurtled back into the fray of the situation.

Lexi screams and shrieks at Henry, Noah shouts for her to calm down. Katrina in the distance is muttering a prayer while Marko wraps his arm around her. Greg is standing next to me, stunned, baffled by what’s just happened here. Henry, muttering his incessant apologies, begins pacing back and forth, shaking his head. Devon shouts at my father’s corpse, to hang on, not to die on him. Skye slowly starts to come to the realization that I came to well before now. My father is dead. There’s nothing we can do about it. He’s gone. I step toward my father, his eyes half open on a table soiled with his blood. I give Devon a gentle push, strong enough to get him to quit, but soft enough not to offend him.

I look down at my father’s face. His worn, tired face. Bending down, with tears in my eyes, I kiss his cheek. It’s cold, weathered, like saddle leather. Gently, I close his eyes and listen as the madness all around me continues. I’m a buoy, drifting on the current of so much emotion that it’s making me nauseous.

This morning I woke up, used to the world around me. Used to what we call normal now. I never expected this. I never even asked for this. Pretty much everyone else in this house had prayed fervently for God to give them back their families, their friends, their girlfriends or boyfriends. Everyone had muttered that prayer except for me.

My father was always a strong man. He had to be. It wasn’t in his nature to be weak or to cower under the pressure of the world around him. I remember quietly sneaking up the stairs when I was little and seeing him sitting on the bed, his back to me as I crept. I was going to surprise him, sneak up on him and shout “Surprise!” just to see his face. But as I crept closer and closer to his room, I noticed that his back was shaking, that he was crying. His face was in his hands, broken and miserable. My father hated life. It was a curse, a shackle that tore him away from Mom. I understood that then. I understood what was the true strength of my father, watching him cry when he thought no one was looking. So much hurt, so much sorrow, and yet, every morning he put on a smile and made us pancakes that looked like Mickey Mouse or scrambled eggs and sausage. That was the kind of man my father was. What he was doing here, on my table, was beyond me. I don’t think he would even have an answer for this, not one that I or any child could understand. It would have to be an answer that only parents could comprehend.

I look over at Lexi while she’s screaming for our father to rise up, to push himself off the table and to come back to the world of the living. Lexi was always the rebellious one. She was always the one who my father had to keep his eye on. But even as long as he had kept an eye on her, I was keeping it on her longer.

He didn’t know about the shadow dance she played with all of us. He was blind to the sneaking out, the parties, the making out with boyfriends in the backyard while we were all supposed to be asleep. I love Lexi, but she treated our father like an unwanted sentinel. As she screams now, tears burning down her face, I can’t help but wonder where was this emotion when he was alive. Her face is streaked red with blood, like some sort of Apache raider or Nordic pirate. Noah, her current and probably last fling, is fighting an uphill battle trying to get her emotions under control.

Noah isn’t going to last. Not just due to the circumstances globally, but because my sister has a habit of chewing up and spitting out nice guys because she doesn’t have a clue who she is. She found Noah with more Red Bull in his system than water, behind a video game monitor at some party she shouldn’t have been at and now they’re together. I look at him, holding her as she fights against him with everything she has and I can’t help but see in his panicked eyes that he’s good. He’s got a good head on his shoulders, even if he does try to hide it.

“I’m so sorry, Valerie.” Henry tries to put a hand on my shoulder.

I swat it away immediately.

I won’t let him touch me. I won’t even let him speak to me. I look over my shoulder, glaring at him. We put that rifle in his hand, put him up on the balcony in the riot gear because we thought we could trust him. We’ve had a standing policy with anyone who finds us that we don’t shoot until necessary. It’s the difference between us and the millions of psychopaths that are roaming the world right now, killing for supplies. We made that pact and Henry had broken it. I look at him and wonder why we even brought him with us. He has absolutely nothing in common with the rest of us, never did. His face is red, boiling with emotion as he takes a step back from me, his hand still put out like he’s consoling some sort of ghost.

“Come on, babe,” Greg says, taking my bloodstained hand. “You don’t need to see this.”

My rock. My sanity. My anchor. I look at Greg. It’s the first time in three years I’ve seen Greg with hair longer than a millimeter. It’s grown out long enough now that he’s pulled it back in a knot. I asked him why he didn’t just do a ponytail, but he tells me that it looks cooler. He said he feels like a samurai. I look at his eyes, full of concern and worry and I wonder who he thinks he’s talking to. There are no tears in my eyes anymore. It was harder when he was alive. It was harder seeing him suffer, witnessing the love he had for me and my sister shining through like a lighthouse in the middle of a storm. That was just like my father. He was always like that. I look at Greg though, and I wonder if he thinks I’m like Lexi, shattered and broken by this. I’m not. I don’t know
what
I am.

“That’s my father,” I tell him.

He looks at me somberly, nodding as if he understands.

“No,” I say sternly, “you don’t get it.” I tell him, “That’s my father, Greg.”

“I know,” Greg says. He was there. He was next to Henry, trying to get everyone on the same page before Henry went crazy and blew a hole through my father’s stomach. From what Henry has been incoherently babbling about for the past twenty minutes, my father had been shouting at them, telling them that he was our father, that he wanted to know if we were here. From what Greg says, he said that he was willing to leave supplies with us and go about his business if we weren’t here. I shake my head. That’s my father, the negotiator, the rational man of the apocalypse.

When he started going to the back of the truck, that’s when Henry had shot him. He put a hole through him, slamming him against the truck, where he slid down into the mud, just as I was coming out of the house. Thinking back, why the hell didn’t I stop what I was doing the moment Greg called for us? Why did I play skeptic, looking at him with a perplexed expression on my face? Why didn’t I just go? Why was I so baffled and bewildered that he’d pull such a stupid, strange prank on me? When did Greg ever do something like that? But when I saw him, it took a moment to comprehend everything that was happening at once. My father was returning to me, into my life like some sort of mythical figure, but dying in the process. I was simultaneously reclaiming and losing everything I had in my past. All because Henry was too fucking trigger-happy.

“No, Greg,” I say to him. Lexi is still shrieking and I turn, staring at her with a cold, unforgiving expression on my face. “Shut up, Lexi,” I shout over her screams. She stops almost immediately, looking at me with venom in her cerulean eyes. “Enough,” I say more gently this time. “He’s gone.” She stares at me with a horrified, disgusted expression on her face and I can barely stand the sight of it. How dare she look at me like I’ve just turned my back on my father? I look away from her and stare at Greg. “My father was in Michigan, Greg. The last time I spoke to my father, he was heading straight for Lake Huron. How in the hell did my father end up on my doorstep?” I turn and look at Henry with fire and malice in my eyes. “And why in the hell did
you
kill him?”

“I’m sorry, Valerie.” Henry shakes his head before hanging it low, defeated and without words.

“Sorry isn’t going to cut it, Henry,” I say bitterly. He looks like a half drowned, greasy coyote that has lived past his years. “You’re never going on watch again. In fact, I don’t want to see you for a very long time. Do you understand me?”

“What—” Henry tries to protest.

“Shut up, Henry,” Marko cuts in, still holding Katrina. “Just get out of her face for a while. Do like she says.”

I look back at my father, feeling Greg’s arms wrapping around my shoulders. I hate that he thinks that he needs to comfort me. I hate that he thinks that after everything that’s happened, I’m still a damsel in need of rescuing. Haven’t we all experienced enough? Haven’t we all realized that only the strong survive in this world?

It’s been over a year since the first crops began to wither, browning underneath the sun after the harvest of the epoch. The sun rose and within a week, super-crops were beginning to die. It was all the media would talk about after a while and in classes, it’s all everyone else would talk about. You couldn’t escape it. Everyone thought that it was a sort of divine justice for everyone who wanted to get rich quick in the agricultural business. In the Amazon, they were using it to hasten the regrowth of the deforest lands, a noble cause and one that we were all more forgiving of.

Everyone said that Africa was spending fortunes on acquiring the fertilizers used to help speed up and genetically alter the crops, in an attempt to feed their perpetually famine-riddled lands. That was probably the noblest cause of it all. It was tragic watching the Amazon shrivel and die and it was even worse watching the hopeful, destitute Africans sitting in their dusty crops. The wealthy hath provided and God hath taken back. There was plenty to talk about in every class. In fact, everyone talked a bit too much about it all.

But then the horror stories started trickling in, beyond the economic devastation and social collapse in these areas. Word started coming in that the crops and even lawns around the farms were dying, that neighborhoods miles away from the farms were losing their lawns and landscapes. I remember the first time the word quarantine was used, I felt a sickly, sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. That was the kind of word the military used. It was a word that never meant a good thing. The world was dying. From there, everything turned to history. It’s a blur of refugee camps, dust storms, global extinction, and a fight for survival that took us back to the Stone Age. All this time, I’ve thought about what’s best for Lexi, what’s best for me. I never stopped to worry about my father.

Truthfully, if there was anyone who was going to survive this, it was going to be my survivalist, wilderness-thriving father. And yet, here he lies. He’s lying there, cold in a pool of his own crimson blood. How could it come to this? How could something like stupid, worthless Henry be the end of my father? That’s not how this is supposed to go.