Lost in the Apocalypse (11 page)

Neil yanked open the door to one of the outbuildings. It was a little shed, not even big enough to park a car in, but it was filled with rusty tools.

Cody came up behind him and peeked in.

“Anything good, boss?” The kid asked, peering around Neil. The two of them stood, side-by-side, eyeing the assortment of gardening tools and farming equipment.

“I don’t even know,” Neil said. “We need Butter or…”

Cody smirked. “Emily. Yeah, I know. She knows everything.”

Neil didn’t protest. Cody was absolutely right. Emily was smarter than any of them, he reckoned, and they’d probably be already dead without her guidance. No, she wasn’t the bravest or the best shot, and she took unnecessary risks sometimes, but she was quick on her feet.

And in a world of undead, you needed that.

You needed someone to depend on who could be fast, who could be quick, who could be witty. You needed someone who could help you think and keep you focused. You needed someone who believed in you even when you didn’t believe in yourself.

You needed a partner who could help you keep moving forward when you thought you might just die.

“An axe,” Neil said, eyeing the equipment inside. He pulled it out. It was heavier than he expected, but then, he’d been a soldier: not a farmer. What did he know about axes? “Maybe Butter will want it,” he said.

Cody nodded. “Looks like a good one to me. Not a lotta rust or anything.” He took the axe from Neil and set it aside. They could clean it up later. The blade had only a small amount of rust and the handle seemed sturdy enough. The house had a fireplace and come winter, they’d want to chop wood for fires.

Then again, Neil thought, maybe they should start splitting logs now. They had plenty of time on their hands and plenty of trees. He didn’t want to go out in cold weather to cut firewood. They could do it now. He pulled out another axe. This one was in poor condition, but perhaps it would still work. He set it beside the first one and kept searching the shed.

**

Kari looked out the kitchen window at the men exploring their new haven and smiled. She turned back to the room and wiped her hands on a dishtowel.

“How fucking domestic,” she muttered under her breath, but she wasn’t sad or regretful. No, for the first time in a very long time, Kari felt hopeful, happy. For the first time in a long time, she thought that maybe, just maybe, things would be all right.

Sometimes it felt like forever since her baby had been killed, the daycare overtaken. Sometimes it felt like forever since she and Cody had managed to escape, but the guilt still weighed heavily on her heart. She needed to learn how to cope with the loss. They all did. Though most of the time, Kari thought everyone else was doing a good job handling their pain but her.

Cody had been with her that morning, spending his break making out with her on the pavilion at the lake. They had been necking like a couple of teenagers when the alarm sounded, when they had hurried back to the CDC, when they had realized it was too late.

Cody was the one who held her back as she screamed, who pushed her into the car before an Infected could sink its teeth into her. Cody was the one who had saved her.

And now here she was: a kept woman. And she didn’t hate it nearly as much as she should have.

Why couldn’t this have happened before? Why couldn’t they have admitted their love, moved in together, or run away? Why couldn’t he have had a chance to be Dillon’s dad? Why couldn’t they have been a family?

She bit back tears as she started thinking about her baby again and wrapped her arms around herself. Her body heat wasn’t enough to stop the cold that had seeped into her skin. Nothing was. Nothing ever would be enough.

No matter what Kari did, no matter how far she ran, she would never stop missing her baby.

But she needed to learn how to face her new reality.

No good ever came from dwelling. None. Kari had a lot of pain, but she had something to keep her going. She had Cody. She had herself. She had Dillon’s memory. She wouldn’t have wanted her baby to give up if she died. He wouldn’t want that for her, either.

Taking a deep breath, Kari turned back to the food splayed out on the counter. She promised to cook dinner, so she needed to decide what they were going to have. She had already cleared out the cupboards in the kitchen and arranged their canned foods by type and expiration date. They would eat the oldest things first. Now she just had to cook them.

The good thing was that cooking required her to focus. She didn’t want to leave things on the stove too long, didn’t want to use more of the propane than they needed to. She didn’t want to burn anything or ruin a pot or make a huge mess. She wanted to make the most of the food they had.

She turned her attention to cooking, finding peace in the realization that there was no time for daydreaming when she was standing in front of the stove. She grabbed a box of matches and lit the range. The propane still worked in the house, but she had to use a math to get the burner lit since this stove had an electric ignition. Lighting the stove was easy, but she always had an unbearable image of herself blowing up the entire house.

It was always a relief when she was finished with that part.

She pulled out a can of corn and one of beans. She had even managed to find some canned chicken. It wasn’t good, by any means, but she could cook it on the range and they’d have a hot meal. They had all gotten over eaten fancy foods. Now every meal was plain, but she did what she cook to spice things up.

Mostly, she thought with a smile, she added lemon pepper.

Lots and lots of lemon pepper.

“Where did they come from?” Butter asked. Emily just leaned back against the seat. What the actual hell? Zombies, she could deal with. Cranky airmen? Sure. But infected cattle? Really? That was what her life had come down to. Fucking cows.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe there was an auction. Maybe a fence got knocked down from the storm. Who knows?”

“Any ideas?” Butter asked, glancing over at her again. He was driving quickly down the paved road. He had passed the turnoff for their new home. For that, Emily was grateful. She didn’t have to tell him to stay away. If they were going to be chased by rabid, infected farm animals, the last thing she wanted was them following her home.

“They’ll stop soon,” she said. “Just keep driving.”

“How can you be sure?” Butter asked, eyebrows raised, obviously wondering how much Emily really knew. The truth was that she knew more than she should. No, she hadn’t been raised in the country, but she’d learn a lot while residing in the rural farmland surrounding Howe. She’d been especially social with her neighbors and they’d given her plenty of information. Whether they did it to be featured in one of her books or simply to be neighborly, she didn’t know.

“Look,” Emily turned back and peeked out the window. Two dozen, maybe. Maybe a bit more. The cows were all ages, though there were only one or two bulls, and running down the road. They pounded, their hooves heavy against the gravel, but she could tell they were beginning to slow. “Even zombies can’t last forever. They’re getting tired.”

“They need a distraction,” Butter said, but they didn’t have one. They had a truck weighted down with the equipment for Butter’s fence. They had water and feed and nails and wood, but a distraction?

That they didn’t have.

“We need to hurry and turn off,” Emily said. “Or we’re going to run out of gas. If they swarm us, they won’t be able to get into the truck, but they can wait us out.” She had the mental image of being trapped in the truck, surrounded by infected cows. How long until she shot herself? How long until she got so hungry that death seemed like a viable option? How long until she decided to risk it and run through the crowd of cattle?

How long?

Butter frowned as he peered at the gas gauge and turned off on the next road. Gravel sputtered beneath the tires and popped up and bounced, hitting the side of the truck. Best of all, it hadn’t rained in a few days, so his speeding kicked up a thick layer of dust that would inevitably make them temporarily invisible to their pursuers.

Butter drove for a mile, then turned into an abandoned driveway and parked, killing the engine quickly. They waited. They didn’t have to for long.

The dust hadn’t even settled when the cows began barreling by: a stampede of the undead, a horde of Infected.

“Are you fucking kidding me?” Butter looked shocked it had worked. They didn’t even slow down, didn’t even turn to wander into the driveway, didn’t even meander through. They just kept running.

“Well, it wasn’t a distraction, but it beats being trampled to death,” Emily murmured. When the last cow had vanished, they waited. Butter would never admit being scared, but Emily suspected he was just as nervous as her about starting the car again. The idea of infected cattle sounded ridiculous, but the truth was that heifers were huge: much bigger than either of them. Who knew what kind of damage they could cause to two little humans?

They waited, then. They sat in the silence in the car and stared at the house whose driveway they were in.

“Do you want to check it out?” Butter asked, but Emily shook her head. She’d had enough exploring for one day. When the last straggling cow wandered past, Butter started the engine and pulled out. He turned back where they had come from, and Emily couldn’t help risking a glance back at the direction the cows had gone.

She couldn’t see any. Not a single freaking one. Where would they go? People in the apocalypse wandered around. That much was obvious. She had seen a few groups of survivors during her time trying to save Melanie, but were animals the same way? Did they stick together when they were dead the way they did when they were alive?

Were they still aware of the others?

“I want to go home,” Emily muttered, leaning her head against the window. She stared at the fields as they whirred by. The grass was still so green. It hadn’t died. Why hadn’t it died? Everything else in the world had died: why not the grass? It was such a little thing, but it made her feel so out of place, so broken.

Maybe it was good. Maybe it gave hope. Next year they could have a garden. They could plant things and grow their own food and find apple trees and all sorts of things.

Melanie and Robert wouldn’t be there to see it, but who cared? Right? Who cared?

Butter eyed Emily out of the corner of his eye. She could tell. He was big and gruff and tatted up to boot. His ripped shirts gave her a clear view of his military tats and eagles and Latin phrases on his shoulders and chest. He was classic in his ink, at least. None of that popular, trendy crap for him. No watercolor tats. Nothing like that.

“You know,” he began, clearing his throat, and she tried not to be surprised. He was going to tell her something, probably something personal. And wasn’t that just lovely? “Home isn’t always what you think it’s going to be.”

“I know.” She said it simply, but the words came out snarky. She sighed. She sucked at this communication thing. “I mean, I get it.” She turned so she was facing him and pulled her booted feet up to the seat. She wrapped her arms around her knees and watched him. “Hero’s journey, right? You can never go home again? I took lit, too, but it’s different in real life. It’s not so simple.”

“It never is.”

“Butter, before this, what did you want out of life?”

He chuckled at that and turned the truck. Butter had no difficulty remembering exactly which roads they’d turned down, where they’d come from, what twists and turns they’d made in their effort to hide from the infected cows.

“I wanted to be free,” he said. “I was getting out of the Air Force. Two days until I left,” he added, and she gasped. Two days. Just two days short of not being at the Air Force Base when it happened. Two days shy of being somewhere else, with someone else. Maybe he would have been somewhere he actually enjoyed instead of running away from Colorado.

“What were you going to do?” She almost didn’t want to know what dreams Butter had lost, but she was curious about him. He was rough and tumble, but like the others she had met, seemed to be soft and mushy beneath that tough-guy exterior.

“My friend offered me a job,” he said. “Nothing too exciting. Fixing bikes,” he shot her a sly glance. “But then, you already knew that when you pegged me for being able to hotwire a car.”

“Lucky guess.”

“Racist guess.”

“Fuck you.”

He laughed again, the sound low and clear. And somehow, listening to Butter laugh made everything feel right with the world, just for a little bit.

“Butter, I have one more question.”

“Shoot.”

“What’s with your weird-ass name? I mean, you’re kind of a badass,” she motioned to his worn-out combat boots and ripped up jeans. His arms were thick and muscular. There was nothing shy or weak or soft about Butter. “Shouldn’t you have a name like Ryker or Zeke or Killer or Throat-Slasher?”

He laughed.

“It’s my last name, unfortunately,” he said with a smile. “My real name is Alan.”

“You’re fucking with me,” her jaw dropped. “Your name is Alan Butter?”

He laughed.

And then they were home.