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

I stop when I reached Monroe. I search out the Red Roofed Inn and kick in door 108 and spend the night on a bed with a chair jammed up against the door. It is nice to have a bed for the first time in a very long time. The sun is just coming up as I lay down and close my eyes. I don’t remember a single dream I had on the journey to this point and I’m okay with that. It is okay not to dream in a world of horrors.

It has been days since Detroit burned and ash continues to rain from the sky as a grim reminder. I have stayed in the room for a few days while I watch the mass migration of people fleeing Detroit. They trickle down the 75 in bands of threes and even upwards of ten. Most of the stragglers are more heavily armed and when night falls, the most malicious and feral of them spill out into the streets. I watch them with wary eyes, peeking between the curtains. These are the men that look like hunters, the kinds of men that I want to keep as far away from as possible. I don’t dare yet venture out.

Several people have stopped at the Inn over the last days, breaking into rooms and holing up for the night before moving on. Fortunately any who had eyed this room gave up when realizing it was secure. There was no energy left to waste among people. Everyone looks weak and starved, even the hunters. But even they have passed now.

My first instinct is to get up and start heading south as quickly as possible. I can’t help but fear that the girls are in perpetual danger, that they need me. I constantly have to remind myself of the fact that they are not helpless children. Val and Lexi can take care of themselves. They know how to survive. After all, they had been there with me the first time my world crumbled.

When Tiffany died, I was lost. I tried the support groups where they’re supposed to help you cope and accept what has come to happen in your life, but the reality is that you never cope. There is a giant hole in your life that will never be healed, never seal up, and never be full again. Like the gash in my face, it is a void that only causes suffering in however long your misery-stricken life lasts. I remember sitting in the basements or conference rooms of churches listening to other men weep about missing their wives. The stone-faced guys were the worst. They didn’t have anything left. Their wives took all of it with them to the grave. As for me, I was silent most of the time, just listening. It was good to know that I wasn’t alone in the way I felt, but at the same time, I wasn’t alone. There were others out there who were pierced with as much agony as I felt at the loss of Tiffany. Breast cancer, why did such a thing even exist?

Suicide was never an option, so endurance was all that I had left for me on this lonely road. The girls were stricken with as much grief as I was, but they had help in recovering. They were young and had friends and grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins. To me, all of their words just felt hollow and pointless. Tiffany was gone. There was nothing left to talk about.

Someone then told me that I might try getting out more, displacing myself from the physical world of my suffering. I can’t to this day recall who had kindled that fire within me, but if all I was to have left was survival, then I needed to learn how to survive. I looked up the best campsites in Michigan and visited each of them over the course of the year with my girls. My sorrow sought me out. I was never free of it, but when I was alone with the kids in the wilderness, I felt closer to Tiffany or God or whatever it was that roamed the unseen world. It ignited a hunger inside of me—a long dormant instinct. I read books on survivalists and tracking. I started experimenting with how to survive on my own with nothing but my bare hands. Eventually I found myself going to sporting goods shops and knowing more than the proprietors. One man even wanted to hire me. I would talk to park rangers and even went to expos for outdoorsmen. I even once flirted with the notion of going up to Alaska, moving there and starting fresh. They say that Alaska is nothing but wilderness and bears, that outlaws and criminals fled there to live in the frontier. But every time I thought about that, I thought of how miserable the girls would be if I took them away from all they knew.

Every time I learned something new, the girls were the ones I shared it with. They were all I had. I showed them how to trap, gut, and skin an animal, how to make an oven out of a can, or what to do if they were lost. I taught them everything I had come to know. We would go to the rock climbing facilities, master their walls. We’d go camping and fishing together. Three times Lexi and I would go bow hunting. We would go rafting and share in a multitude of outdoor adventures. It was what we had, what we shared with one another.

As the girls left me behind, learning eventually became my drug. I would take free classes at the YMCA or the local library on all sorts of things. I took classes on home maintenance, auto mechanics, and even one on interior decorating. My unhealthy craving for knowledge kept my mind preoccupied with materials other than wallowing in my own loneliness and confronting my own sense of abandonment. I taught them everything I learned when they came home.

I could only pray now that everything I had taught them was coming into use. They knew how to forage, how to board up and fortify a house, they knew how to ration, and they knew how to keep safe. I had trained them all of that. They knew self-defense and how to work a gun properly. I picture them on the coast, on a beach house in Florida, alone with their group of friends, holed up and waiting for me. Alone, I try to recall anything I might have heard of Florida on the news before heading for my father’s cabin. A tidbit. Something. “We’ll be safe, Daddy,” Val had said. “Don’t worry about us. Get somewhere safe.” It was so laughable that she was the one telling me to be safe. Sometimes, it was hard to tell who was in charge with those two.

I try to remind myself how strong they are, how independent they’d grown up after Tiffany had died. They knew that I was hurting just as much as I knew they were. We understood each other and we were there to help one another. I don’t think we were as much of a family as we were a team. There was no living after Tiffany died. There was only survival. So all this desolation was familiar to us. I had to remember they weren’t helpless and as such I couldn’t be careless in my trek to them.

When I don’t think of them, my mind wanders to the Girl in the road. My hand trembles every time I think about the fact that I had killed her. From all the blood that had pooled under her head and neck, it hadn’t been an immediate kill. She’d bled out from the wounds I’d given her and that boy, suffering for only a few more miles down the road before they tossed him out like an empty soda cup. I ended those two people. I caused their lives to abruptly cease forever. They had come this far, endured so much, and I had ended them with four bullets total. There was something about that which sickened me. I was not a killer. I had hunted before, but I had never once been violent toward another person.

My thoughts then drift toward the Kid. I can see him walking down the street while I watched, paralyzed with fear. The sight of him fleeing the liquor store, stumbling into the street as the three attackers honed in on him like wolves over a rabbit; it burns in my mind. The fact that I had done nothing haunts me more than killing the Girl and my attacker in the road. They had harmed me. I can justify their deaths. I can sleep with that on my conscience. But this one, watching as three men killed the Kid, that is hard for me to justify. Sure, I tell myself that my daughters are all that matters. Getting to them is the number one priority and that no one else ranks up there with making sure I make it to them. I can recite that speech to myself word for word, but that doesn’t help the horrible implications of what that means. Even the two of us standing together against those three probably would have meant that I would have ended up dead with the Kid, but it would have been the good thing to do. The right thing to do.

But there isn’t anything right about the world we live in anymore. The entire fucking planet has given up on us. You’ve got to be pretty damn low for a whirling, celestial object to abandon you. What does that say about us as a people? I think it’s pretty clear.

I remember taking Survey of World Religions in my sophomore year of college. I remember when we were studying Christianity and we were reading passages that distinguished Heaven and Hell. I don’t know what the original language meant by this or what it truly says, but I remember reading the passage about the Devil and his fallen angels being cast down to Earth, condemned to walk in separation of God. There was no Hell written in that passage, only Earth. I remember looking around and realizing that I was living
in
Hell. I remember reading that Hell was a Norse concept and that ancient Christians believed only in Paradise and Earth. It made the evils of the world make sense. I remembered liking that. I remember genuinely understanding that. I remember when the doctor mentioned lymph nodes years later—fuck lymph nodes! When the hell are lymph nodes used for anything other than cancer? Nothing good comes from fucking lymph nodes!—I remember that I never once questioned the powers that be. Like I said, it made sense. I didn’t like it. But it made sense.

One thing that troubles me is why they took the Kid. When my attacker finally died of the rifle shot through his abdomen, his buddies just tossed him in the middle of the road and left him. So why did they drag the body of the Kid into the liquor shop with them? And where did they go after that? Did they live in there? Or was it some sort of trap set up to kill those looking for a little buzz to cope with the apocalypse? Were people that sadistic and horrible? Again, this doesn’t surprise me.

I can’t help but think about what Port Huron had said on the radio. Even the Preacher in the end was talking about it. Zombies. I hate the notion of zombies. Sure I loved post-apocalyptic movies and TV shows when they were on the TV, but that was out of the love of seeing the world steeped in chaos. I always thought the zombie elements of those shows were absolutely ridiculous and even irrelevant. The dead rising to feed on the flesh of the living is dumb. It was a childish fear that dated back to a time when primitive man was scared of rotting corpses. I never bought into zombies being an ancient fear of man. No, we weren’t afraid of the dead coming back and eating us, we were afraid of the dead. So why were two radio voices talking about zombies? Wasn’t that just blatant fear-mongering in a world that was now built upon the single foundation of terror?

Unless they weren’t actually the dead rising and walking. I mean, by science fiction standards, sure a poisonous, mutating fertilizer might be capable of raising the dead, but this is the real world. So what if the zombies they were talking about weren’t actually the walking dead? What if they were just the walking hungry? I haven’t seen an herbivore in ages. In fact, I don’t think they survived. Even the squirrels succumbed after their stores of nuts were dried up. All I’ve seen are carrion birds and anything that eats the dead. The only meat we humans are getting is going to be coming from one of those two sources. As for looting, Detroit—and probably every other major metropolitan hub—is picked clean of canned and bagged goods. What else are people supposed to survive on if there is nothing to scavenge? I feel a chill when I come to the conclusion that I no doubt know to be true.

They eat the dead. That’s the mystery behind the zombies. They murdered that Kid and they dragged him into the liquor store, and wherever they went, I know that they ate him. It’s the only source of meat that’s left in the world and even that supply is dwindling. My word, that is the most horrifying and despicable thing that I could ever think of. Isn’t that bad for your health? Or is that just an old wives’ tale we’re told to keep us from becoming cannibals? I suppose it doesn’t matter. I’m not going into any more buildings that look suspicious. I’m sure as Hell going to be avoiding cities from now on.

I come to the conclusion that if I want to survive, I need to start being nocturnal. That was what the others in Detroit were doing. That was why they were sleeping during the day. At night, that’s when they creep out of their lairs and take to the streets. By luck I had avoided them up until this point but without a sanctuary to fortify and hide in, there’s no point staying in my normal daytime routines. If I take to the road at night, I’ll be less likely to be found. I can keep on the move. I can stay safe. As far as that word has meaning. Fear was the only thing keeping me safe and I had to respect where it led me. If it told me that the night was my best chance at safety, then I had to respect that.

But that wasn’t all it told me. It told me that the old world was dead. Everything about it. There was only so much that I could cling to from the past and the most I could afford to keep belonged to Lexi and Val. I could be their father, I could love them, and desire to protect them; but that was all I could bring with me into this world. Everything else, it had to wither, burn, and blow away in the wind. There was no more morality in this world. There were no rules, no gods, and no masters. There was only the independent self. Killing those who got in my way had to be acceptable. Letting the weak die while the horrid strong preyed upon them, that was the only law of the land now. It was a jungle outside of this hotel room and I had to accept it. I was in a new world and I needed to carve out my place within it.

When darkness envelops the world, I open my door and take my first steps out into my nocturnal life. I travel for hours, looking for a pharmacy, though my gash is beginning to feel better. Regular cleaning is doing wonders for it, but I still fear infection. I find nothing and I am still too close to Detroit for comfort. All that I can see of the city are vast, billowing clouds of ash and smoke drifting off toward the east like a mighty curtain hiding the carnage. I can hear booms from explosions far beyond me and the distant cracks of gunshots, too far to register any immediate danger.

I hear the distant roar of an engine and immediately make for the side of the road. Dropping down into a crouch behind some trash cans made useless long ago, I watch as an old Silverado rolls by at a cautious pace. I see three men in the bed of the truck with a pile of supplies, their guns ready and their eyes scanning the darkness for danger. I begin to wonder if I am the only ‘normal’ person left in the world as the truck’s tail lights vanish over a crest. Then again, I did just pledge to let that ‘normal’ person inside of me wither and die. No, I am one of
them
now. I have to accept that.