LEFT ALIVE (Zombie series Box Set): Books 1-6 of the Post-apocalyptic zombie action and adventure series (67 page)

“I’m going to miss you too, Skye,” I say to her as I wrap my arms around her and hold her close to me. She smells like blueberry muffins. “Don’t let Devon walk all over you.”

When we’re done hugging, she scampers off to her little corner of the house. I can’t help but feel like this is the second exodus this house has seen and that the last remaining survivors are now the doomed ones. From the moment I heard about Tony’s plan, I felt that he was never going to make it. Now, I feel the same way those staying behind. I stand up and head for the porch upstairs. Pushing open the door, I see Katrina standing out on the deck with her arms wrapped around her chest, looking at the truck below. I stand with her, watching as Henry and Greg fire it up and the engine roars to life like a beautiful roaring lion.

“I’m sorry we couldn’t save Marko,” I tell Katrina.

“I know,” she replies. She looks over at me with a strong smile that comes off as little more than a twitch. “You’re a strong woman, Val. If anyone is going to find a way to save the world, it’s going to be you.”

“I’m hoping that other people already figured out how to save the world,” I smile at her. “I hope that they just need an extra pair of hands.”

“I’m sure they will,” Katrina says as she hugs me. “Don’t forget about us down here. If you find salvation, send them our way.”

“You know I will,” I promise her.

“This is worse than I could ever possibly imagine,” Henry says as he looks at the remains of a Walmart that has entirely burned in some blaze. The sign is bent at a forty-five degree angle thanks to the truck that plowed into it. The sign looks old and haunted, but the building behind it looks like some photo of a war zone. Henry stares at it with a horrified and distraught look on his face. I look over at him, knowing exactly how he feels. Yesterday was a hard day to get over. Everything was completely destroyed. “Where in the world is everyone? I mean, there had to be people still trying to figure something out, right? Once the government collapsed, I assumed that little communities of survivors would pop up, trying to find some way to survive, but this is completely abandoned. There’s no signs of life anywhere.”

“Not for miles and miles,” Greg says behind the wheel of the enormous truck.

I was the only one who noticed the bloodstains in the floor and seat of the truck when I climbed in and was sandwiched between Henry and Greg. Lexi and Noah took to the back of the truck and I suspect that they’re already fighting with each other. It’s only been a few hours and we’re already more than an hour farther from the beach house than we were yesterday. Henry spent most of the first two hours in complete shock, taking in the ruins of the world he used to know.

“Devon and the others are crazy,” Henry says finally, unable to stop talking now that he’s started. “I mean, if they could see just how terrible everything is, they wouldn’t have stuck around. They’d want to come too. I mean, there’s no hope to any of this. They’re not going to be able to scavenge through this. An entire year has passed and scavengers have already been through everything. They’re screwed.”

“We tried to warn them,” I mutter, pulling my father’s map out and starting to take a look at it.

“I know that it’s a raw subject, but tell me about these monster things you saw yesterday,” Henry says finally. I look up at him and resist the urge to punch him in the face. Not because of the question he just asked, but because I really can’t stand hearing his voice or looking at him still. I try to fight back my violent tendencies, but they’re starting to boil up to the surface. “Come on, I mean, level with me. I’m out here with the rest of you and you know what they are. I don’t want to be taken completely off guard when I see one of them for the first time.”

I don’t answer him. It’s not something I want to talk about.

“They looked like people from the old Holocaust footage you used to see in history classes,” Greg says after a moment, willing to have a chat with Henry over the horrors we witnessed. Better him than me. “They were covered in their own shit and filth, but they aren’t like the walking dead. They’re actually alive, or technically, I guess. They didn’t seem to have anything going on behind their eyes except to eat.”

“Jesus,” Henry mutters. “What could make something like that happen?”

“No clue,” Greg answers halfheartedly.

I stare at the map, envisioning the route that my father took, wondering if it all will look like this. I wonder if there are people the deeper we’ll be going into America. After all, I assume that major cities are still going to have people living inside of them. That would be the locations with the largest scavenging grounds, the most weapons, and the best shelter. The weather was reshaping the entire map with each storm that came and went. Soon, there wasn’t going to be any way of knowing where roads used to be other than by the power lines, fences, and power poles. I stare at my father’s route through Florida.

He went all the way to Gainesville to check out the campus. He’s marked the spot with a circle and a few strange annotations. Over the campus, he put a black cross. I’m not sure what the crosses mean, he’s put one on Atlanta as well, but I don’t think it’s anything important, nothing special at least for the moment. I’m sure it’ll make sense once we’ve been on the road for a while. I imagine that there’s an entire world shaping out here in the wasteland that makes sense to the conditions that now exist, and we’ll be introduced to it soon enough. I imagine that there’s some form of trade, some form of law that has taken over. There must be something.

I remember reading about how conquest wasn’t the most successful form of power there was in the ancient times, that trading empires became more and more powerful as the world transitioned into the high Middle Ages and the Renaissance period. Resources garner support from those who want in on the power and the wealth that it provides. Places like Venice grew into having vast influence over what started as simple merchants and tradesmen. There would have to be people out there like that still, people with lots of food looking to garner support for their protection with a can of peas. I think that it’s the optimism inside of me that pushes to hope that a society exists in some form or another, but so far, we’ve seen nothing. If anything is more apparent than the fact that Florida has been completely destroyed, then I don’t know what is. Maybe Miami, Orlando, Jacksonville, and Tampa still have survivors lingering, but the byways are completely barren and vacant. It’s more than a little disheartening.

I look at the map, seeing that my father had blood smeared across one entire side. It makes me a little uncomfortable. I wish I could talk to him for a while. I wish his death hadn’t been so immediate. I would have loved to have heard all that he went through to find us. A heads up about what we’ll be facing over the days to come would be great as well. But his story is lost to us. His wisdom and experience expelled like the flame on a candle in a storm.

Running my fingers along the map’s route, I can’t help but feel completely lost and baffled by the way my father got to us. There are times where he completely abandons every form of road and seems to just drive wherever he wants. At other points, it appears he’s driving to the right or left, parallel to major interstates which makes me wonder if he took a service road or something, but why would he avoid the major arteries of America? If so many people are gone, is it really that terrifying to be on the road? Maybe there are more people out there than any of us would have thought back at the beach house.

My eyes inevitably return to Atlanta, the spot on the map with the most activity. There are symbols, letters, and another black cross over Atlanta. There are flames over the circle surrounding the town and I can’t help but wonder what the heck happened in Atlanta with him. Next to the city is scribbled the annotation:
RIP Lindsay
. I don’t know who Lindsay is. She might be someone he knew from work or was part of his group heading south. Maybe there was a whole pack of them looking for some kind of salvation in the south while my father looked for his family. Maybe that’s what the black crosses mean. Maybe that’s where he lost people.

As I think about the name Lindsay, I wonder who she truly was to him. My father never dated after my mother died. I don’t remember her too much, but I do remember my father being completely broken by her. She was his heart and soul. She was his everything. As he lay dying on the dining room table upstairs in the beach house, he muttered her name over and over again. He was a loyal father, the kind that would dedicate his everything to the happiness of Lexi and me. But he never found any form of love again. I know that it’s more common among men who lose their wives to seek out a familiar sense of love and connection, but my father was never like that. He was loyal to my mother all the way to the end. I remember thinking how sad that was and that he deserved better. After the first time I kissed a boy and after I lost my virginity, I remember thinking in the following days that my father deserved that kind of bond, that kind of fun. He was like a monk, living alone with his two daughters, giving them everything he had while he just waited to be reunited with the love of his life, in death.

Whoever Lindsay was, she had to have been important enough to my father to have her immortalized on his map. Then again, she might not even be a woman. Maybe Lindsay was a dog that he kept or a beloved vehicle that he was dedicated to. My father was quirky about naming the things he loved, I guess that was the writer inside of him that compelled him to name inanimate objects. He personified everything he came in contact with that he thought important. It got to a point where it was frustrating as a teenager, but I loved it as a child. Who knows what Lindsay is or was? It’s beyond my ability to find out now, I suppose.

Looking up, I realize that Henry and Greg have been talking this entire time. I’m not sure what was said, but I’m gathering that it’s just been wild speculation on what we’re going to find when we reach Dayton. I listen to them, amused at what they’re coming up with. I’m not sure if adding to this conversation will be worth it, but finding out what they’re talking about definitely lightens my spirits. I look over at Henry who is shaking his head in frustration.

“Of course it has to be a military instillation,” Henry cries. “Who else is going to have the funding to solve any kind of a crisis like this? They’ve got to have federal backing in order to have the equipment, technology, and personnel to solve the greatest problem we’ve ever faced. Hell, this is basically the Manhattan Project for the current era.”

“If it were military, then wouldn’t we have heard about it?” Greg snaps back. “When the radio was still on, people were breaking into military installations all the time, trying to see what the government was actually doing to try and get us out of this shit storm, but they came up with nothing every time. I’m telling you, it was probably privately funded by some billionaire who doesn’t want to see the world completely destroyed.”

“All the billionaires are gone, buddy-boy,” Henry chuckles to himself. “Those assholes were on their private jets to tropical islands that will never see the kind of destruction that we’ve experienced on the continents. Besides, the President issued that all federal funds and personnel capable of finding a cure to all of this be sent to stations to work out some sort of reversal to it. I’m telling you, we show up at Dayton and we’re going to be greeted by heavily armed men with the President’s yes or no being the deciding factor on if we’re killed or not.”

“You serious?” Greg looks across the seat at Henry.

“About what?” Henry looks across me to Greg.

“About the island stuff,” Greg replies. “You said that the continents are the only ones affected by all of this.”

“Well yeah,” Henry says blatantly, as if it’s super obvious. “The moment all of this shit started going down, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and dozens of other sovereign island nations declared that their borders were closed to the influence of outside materials. They went Nazi Germany on their countries to ensure that none of the toxins made it to their homes. As far as we know, it probably worked, I mean, we’re all still breathing, aren’t we?”

“So those people heading to Bermuda and the Bahamas might have found safety?” Greg lifts an eyebrow. I’m surprised that he’s never thought about this. Everyone was talking about Australia when all of this was going down. Greenland and Iceland were also big topics of conversation. There were others saying that north was the way to go, find the snowy tundra as a source of sanctuary from the agricultural plague. People were running, that was the main point that everyone was hitting on.

“Nah, those places are too small,” Henry answers. “They would have been overwhelmed and probably broke out in fighting. Those places would have been a blood bath.”

“What do you think, babe?” Greg gives me a nudge from his elbow and I look at him with apathetic eyes.

“I think that it’s probably a mixture,” I say, yawning. “People probably started working together and gave up on the whole government and private funding thing.”

“Jesus,” Henry says, leaning forward in his seat.

I watch where he’s pointing and as we approach it, I can’t help but feel the same amount of shock and horror at what we’re seeing. Driving over a bridge, I look at the crest where there’s a white truck with some sort of heavy machine gun mount on the back of it. All across the road, bodies are scattered, rotting in the open sunlight since there isn’t anything to eat them. Greg comes to a stop and we look at the dead men all across the street. They were thrown from the truck. One of them is sprawled out on the hood of the truck while the others seem to have met their brutal end being scattered across the bridge. It’s a grisly and disgusting sight. But it confirms some suspicions that we all have.

These people were killed recently and extremely violently. I think back to bullet holes all over the truck we’re now driving and looking at the mounted heavy machine gun in the back of the truck. My father had to have experienced people like this on his journey or with a heavy weapon much like this one. Whoever killed them forced them from the wreckage and into the road before executing or killing the last of them. No matter what the reason, this end was violent, but it was by people nonetheless.

This can only mean that there are people around here. It’s not that we’re completely abandoned out here and forgotten, there are actual people roaming around somewhere and we might be able to find them. It’s just a matter of wondering how dangerous they are. As I stare at each gruesome kill, I can’t help but wonder who would do such a horrible thing. But thought brings me to the most important of my revelations so far.

These kills were not committed by the flesh-eating horrors back at the Coast Guard’s base. They’ve not been eaten. There are other people out here and they’re vastly capable of extreme violence. At the sight of all of this, I’m not sure who I should fear more. Should I be terrified of the living and cognizant that are roaming the world, looking for food and supplies? Or should I be terrified of the mindless slaves to their hunger and whatever cause that has led them to their current state? It’s odd to think about, and I think that the best answer is that I should be afraid of all of them. Trust no one. I look at Henry, who is starting to look uncomfortable surrounded by such a scene.