Lost in the Apocalypse (3 page)

Emily managed to get a restless night's sleep before scouring the kitchen for food. She took some crackers and shoved some dried fruit in her backpack. Between shelves of rotten vegetables and moldy leftovers, she found a bottle of water and a can of soda in the fridge. The previous owners were gone, but they hadn’t left in a hurry. They had probably been at work when the infection first hit. Most people were. That's why there were still so many empty houses: no one could get home.

Emily didn't leave the house the same way that she came in. Instead, she grabbed a set of car keys off a hook on the wall and left through the front door like a civilized person. She even closed the door behind herself. She could be civilized.

She could be normal.

As she slid into the driver's side and started the engine, the tiny car roared to life. The previous owner liked ska music. A
Reel Big Fish
CD was blaring. Emily turned off the music, much as she missed it, and tried to focus. The gas gauge was at half a tank. It would be more than enough to get Emily home if she could find a road leaving the city that was still clear. While this part of town was fairly easy to navigate, quite a few roads had been blocked with people panicking. Once everyone realized what Artovax really did, they weren't going to sit around the house and die. Instead, entire cities of people tried to leave town at once, causing massive traffic jams and essentially turning towns into death traps.

Emily wasn't as familiar with Grimsby as she should have been. It was close to where she lived, sure, but the tiny roadmap in her backpack was crumpled and difficult to read. She realized far too late how dependent she had become on her cell phone's GPS system. Cell phone reception had lasted an entire day before going out. The electricity had made it three.

She drove around for awhile, failing to find a way out of town that wasn't completely blocked. Finally giving up, she ditched the car. It had been nice while it lasted, the air conditioning a welcome reprieve, but it would have been too easy. Nothing was easy anymore.

She found a road that seemed to lead away from the heart of the city. According to her compass, it headed east. That was good. That was where she needed to be. A line of cars blocked the road, making it impossible to drive through but not impossible to climb over. Surely there would be undead here. Holding her gun in hand, she stayed as close to the edge of the road as possible, never letting her eyes stray from the cars.

Each step felt like it took an hour. Her boots crunched on bits of broken glass mingled with blood. No matter how many cities she went to, no matter how many roads she saw, the sight of bodies never seemed real. It never seemed to get any easier. You had to detach yourself from it if you didn't want to go crazy. Susan hadn't been able to. She
had
gone crazy. Seeing your husband blow his brains out in front of your 7-months-pregnant self would do that.

Emily took another step.

The sun was up now, shining brightly. She wanted to close her eyes and imagine a better world, imagine a more beautiful place. She wanted to pretend that she was anywhere but here, but she couldn't. She had to be alert. She had to be awake. She had to be completely on top of everything that would happen between here and the end of the road.

She needed to make it to the highway.

The world was surprisingly silent as she climbed over a tiny Volkswagon Bug that was sandwiched between two SUVs. As her boots hit the ground on the other side, she ignored the feeling that she was being watched. Emily always felt like she was being watched. Before the end of the world had come and gone, she hadn’t noticed the way silence was eerie. She hadn’t noticed that without the normal sounds of traffic or people, the world seemed scary.

She was almost to the end of the road, almost to the first stretch of the freeway, when a moan let her know that she wasn't alone. Emily whirled around, urging her eyes to locate the Infected that was there. She knew he was there. She had heard him. No matter how quiet the creatures tried to be to fit in with the silence around them, the undead couldn't help but get excited when they saw fresh meat.

Their low moans were what gave them away.

Emily heard those sounds in her dreams. She had a feeling that when she was an old woman, she would still be having nightmares filled with the sounds of the undead.

If
she managed to make it that long, that is.

At this rate, she’d be lucky to make it to next week.

Suddenly, she saw the Infected. He was there next to the building. Emily glanced forward. There was nearly a block left of townhouses before she'd be in the open, before she'd be able to ditch the road and just run. Between her and her freedom there were at least a dozen cars she'd have to make her way around. Turning back, she sized up the Infected. He was tall and lanky. In a former life, he'd probably been a high school quarterback. All the girls had probably loved him. Now he was just flesh.

She raised her gun and aimed. She didn't want to waste the bullet, didn't want to let the others nearby know where she was, but she couldn't outrun this one. He still looked fresh. With a loud bang she pulled the trigger and the boy crumpled to the ground. Immediately, moans from the surrounding streets and possibly from inside the townhouses began to fill the air. Emily started to run. She climbed over cars and squeezed between them until she was at the end of the street. The highway stretched ahead, still covered with cars, but now there were open plains on either side of the road.

She ditched the road and started running through the dead grass. The brown blades crunched as she squished them. She didn’t bother to look back. She couldn’t waste time with that. They knew where she was, so the only thing she could do was move forward and hope she was fast enough today.

The sound of her heart pounding in her chest drowned out her heavy breathing. All she could do was run. She headed toward a clump of houses, hoping it would give her a place to hide. They all looked abandoned and worn. Most of the windows were broken on these ones. Emily skipped the main houses. If the windows had been broken, someone had probably been inside. Who knew what they had left behind? Who knew if they had been infected?

The growls stayed strong as she tried her luck at opening car doors. She couldn't hope to hotwire a car. That wasn't in her cards. Finally, though, a back door of a minivan slid open and Emily collapsed inside, closing and locking the door behind her. She crawled to the back row and lay quietly on the floor of the van. She was breathing so heavily that she just
knew
someone would find her.
Something
would find her. This was the end. She knew it.

She tried to stop gasping for breath. She needed to stop. Nothing could make things different. Nothing could change her world now. In and out. She stared at the worn ceiling of the minivan, trying not to wonder what the different stains were from. It smelled old and rotten. Not rotten in the way a corpse rots, but more like someone had been eating macaroni and forgotten to finish the bowl. Maybe the family who owned the car had been busy when the apocalypse happened.

Maybe they hadn't been so hungry after all.

The world spun around her as Emily remained perfectly still in the back of the minivan. She heard the Infected growling. They were on the street now. They were looking for her. She wished suddenly that the windows were tinted, but they weren't. Reaching onto the back bench, she grabbed a dingy blanket and pulled it over herself, hoping it would buy her a bit of protection, hoping it would mean that they couldn't see her right away.

When she closed her eyes, all she saw was Melanie. Her sister's smiling face was all Emily had wanted to see. It was all she wanted ever, really. She had never been a good big sister. She'd never really been there for Melanie. It wasn't a surprise to most people. After all, there was quite an age gap between them. But that hadn't stopped her from chasing her sister down when the infection had hit. That hadn't stopped her from trying to save Melanie.

But she couldn't.

She had been bitten too soon, lost too quickly. Emily would have done anything to save her. Anything. But she couldn't.

She hadn't been strong enough to save her sister.

Emily felt like she had been running for a million years, fighting the same fight for as long as she could remember, even though it had only been a few weeks. Things were different now, more different than they had ever been. And the world was no longer the beautiful place that she had once thought it was.

It was impossible to make herself feel comfortable in the car.

So she focused on breathing, getting through one moment at a time. The groans of the Infected grew closer. She wondered if they would be able to sense her fear, to pinpoint the terror that ripped through her soul. Emily had never been the type of girl to worry about what was going to happen, not until now. She had never been afraid in the way that she was now. She didn't want to die, not really. And when it came right down to it, she did feel afraid. She felt afraid that they would catch her. She felt afraid that they would tear her apart. She had seen enough people being eaten that she knew it wasn't the way to die. But what was the alternative? When you really thought about it, nobody grew old anymore. Nobody went to a nursing home anymore. You could be killed today or you could be killed on a different day, but it was almost a guarantee that you would be killed.

It was just a matter of when.

A shadow fell over the minivan, rendering the insides darker than they had been before. They had found her.

Though the zombies walked by the minivan, none seemed to figure out that Emily was nestled safely inside. She lay flat on her back and tried to close her eyes. She was tired and hungry and sad, but none of that mattered. None of it ever did anymore. The only thing she really cared about these days was finding a way to keep on living, finding a way to survive.

To be honest, though, she supposed it didn’t really matter if she lived or died. Not anymore. Not without Melanie.

Her sister had always been the glue that had held the family together. Long after her parents died, long after the sad looks and pitying faces disappeared, and long after the hushed whispers could no longer be heard, Melanie had been strong when Emily couldn’t. Emily would cry herself to sleep, thinking about the way her life had turned out, and Melanie always would promise her that things would be okay someday.

They weren’t now.

They were so far past “okay” that Emily wondered why she had ever tried to believe her.

None of it mattered anymore.

She listened until she was sure that the infected creatures were gone. When she could no longer hear the sounds of their growls or see shadows cast over the little family vehicle, she got out of the minivan and kept walking. There was nowhere to go but home, though she wasn’t sure she even wanted to be
there
anymore. What was the point? She had managed to make it through the first few weeks of the infection simply because she wanted to save her sister. She had managed to make it through more than she ever thought possible just because she needed something to strive for.

Now that was gone and she was alone.

Emily kept walking.

She could hear them in the distance: the Infected. She could hear their moans and their noises and their rustling, but still, she walked on. There was nothing else to do, nowhere else to go. She kicked a rock as she walked along and listened to it bounce along on the cement. The sound was much louder than it should have been and for a second, she was worried that they would hear her, that they would come after her again, but they didn’t, so she just kept walking.

***

Emily had lived just outside of Howe, Kansas for nearly two years. She had quit her job to be a writer and with her first few royalty checks, had purchased a small cabin and the accompanying land. It was cliché, she knew, but she loved the silence that her little farm afforded her. She loved being able to slum around her two-bedroom cabin in her pajamas and write stories about anything she wanted to.

She loved the solitude.

Now, as she approached her home, she only hoped that she would find it as empty as when she left nearly a month ago. She worried that others had found it, destroyed it. She worried that the Infected had somehow managed to break in and make themselves a nice little home. She worried about a lot of things, but most of all, Emily worried that she was going to drink her entire bottle of hidden scotch the second she walked through the door.

That was all she needed.

When she got close, she saw tire tracks at the edge of her dirt driveway. They weren’t hers. She had been gone long enough that any tracks her car had left would have been washed away by now. No, these were new, fresh. They were from the last day or two, at most.

She peeked around the corner, but wasn’t completely surprised to see a truck parked in her driveway. It wasn’t hers. Of course. She hadn’t been gone long, not really. In zombie world, though, she knew she had been gone for a lifetime. She wondered if the new residents had found the scotch. She wondered if there would be any left.

Emily hid behind some trees at the edge of her land and cautiously walked around. She knew her woods well. When she wasn’t writing, she was exploring her property and trying to come up with story ideas.

Now, though, wasn’t the time for idle daydreaming. Emily needed to figure out what was going on. She counted four people mulling about in the yard, acting as if they owned the place. Fuck. One or two people she might be able to take, but four? There was no chance. A millions scenarios raced through her mind. Should she try to kill them in their sleep? Should she try to burn down the cabin? The idea of destroying her home made her chest tighten. She couldn’t.

Three men stood in the driveway, talking about something. Who knew what the hell they were going on about? A woman stood in the doorway to the cabin, leaning against it. Her arms were crossed over her chest. She looked upset about something. Emily wondered what it was.

“You already took my damn house,” she mumbled under her breath. “What next?” She was on a bit of an incline that overlooked the house. She sat down, peeking over the hill. She peered at the scene before her. What were these people doing? More importantly, were they there to stay? If they had only just arrived, perhaps they would leave just as quickly.

Aside from the unwelcome visitors, her home appeared to be unharmed. Trees surrounded the sides of the cabin and led into a huge forest. Emily owned fifteen acres of it, but the rest was all owned by some reclusive old billionaire who lived in another state and never checked on his property.

Basically, it was all hers to use as she saw fit since no one else ever came out here. Now that the zombies had come, the area was even more secluded. Part of her was surprised, when she thought about it, that the group had been able to find her home. She was a few miles from the main road, which meant most people didn’t wander this far. It was just her luck that this group had, though. Just her luck. Her sister was dead and now she couldn’t even go home and get super, completely, totally drunk.

Emily kept watching, trying to choke back the tears that made their way to the edges of her eyes. She couldn’t cry. Not now. She feared that if she started, she might not stop again. There wasn’t time to mourn Melanie. She couldn’t. And she really shouldn’t be such a wuss about something as ordinary as death. This was the world now, she silently chided herself. This was her life.

The road was to the west of the cabin. To the east of her house was a small garden, one she had tenderly worked on and slaved over. A few of her plants were starting to come up, which she was grateful for, because to be honest, she was pretty damn sick of eating canned food. On the north side of her tiny garden was a huge, old barn. It was falling down in places and Emily never went inside. It had been there when she bought the property and though she didn’t plan to use it, she liked to take pictures of it, so she left it.

A few stray cats used to live in the barn, but after the infection, even the cats had disappeared. They had vanished quickly. Emily had waited only a few days to go find Melanie, but the cats were already gone by then.

The house was four miles from the edge of town. She hadn’t seen zombies this far out of town, but she wouldn’t put it past them. You could never be too careful.

The men continued to talk in the yard. Their voices were growing louder. Emily could hear part of their conversation now. She leaned forward, straining to listen to what they were saying. Even if she couldn’t hear the entire conversation, any information she gained could help her figure out a way to get her house back. She couldn’t fight them off, but maybe they were planning to leave. Maybe she’d be able to wait them out. At the very least, maybe she could sneak inside and grab a few essentials before she wandered off and found a new place to live.

Or before she gave herself over to the zombies.

“We should stay,” one man said firmly. “It’s perfect.” He had brown hair and a scar running down the left side of his face. If she didn’t know better, Emily would assume it was from a zombie attack, but it looked old and healed. She wondered how he had gotten it. It gave the man an aura of danger. None of the men looked weak, by any means, but this one looked especially deadly. If the electricity ever came back on, maybe she’d use him as inspiration for a character in her book. Fucking computers. Why didn’t she write on a typewriter like all the classic authors did?

“Best to keep moving,” the next man protested. He had green hair. “Maybe stay for another day or two, at most. Yeah, this place has a garden, but what?” He glared at the produce. “We just gonna eat blueberries for the rest of our lives?”

“I like blueberries,” Emily mumbled out loud, glaring at the men from her spot between the trees.

“Me, too.” A voice said from behind her. Emily jumped and tried to turn around to see who was talking to her, but just as she started to, she felt the barrel of a gun being pushed against her head.

“Don’t move,” the voice said. “You have thirty seconds to explain who you are, why you’re here, and why I shouldn’t kill you.”

Emily gritted her teeth. This wasn’t what she signed up for. She didn’t need crap from some stranger, someone who had stolen
her
home. When the infection started and she decided to go try to save her sister, she knew it was a risk. She understood there was a chance this would happen. Survivors or zombies, people were all the same. Dangerous. What she
didn’t
need was this. Any of it. She wished her sister wasn’t dead and that zombies hadn’t come and that this asshole didn’t have a gun pointed at her.

“Get your fucking gun off my head,” she spat, unable to pretend to be nice. “And then, since this is
my
house, maybe you should explain to me why I shouldn’t kill
you
.”

She felt the gun slowly being removed from her head and she turned around. She blinked several times and then sucked in a gasp when she saw the man standing in front of her. If ever there was a face for “tall, dark, and handsome,” this was it. He was taller than her, but not by much. She guessed he was maybe 5’10, 5’11. He was fit, though, and toned. He worked out; that was for damn sure. Though she had lost weight since the infection started, she didn’t think that this man had. He looked good. Really good.

Fuck
. She thought.
Am I seriously getting turned on at this?
It had been months since she’d been with a man romantically. Nearly a year, almost. Writers weren’t really known for their social skills and Emily’s were particularly poor when she was in the middle of writing a book. The last date she had been on was so bad, she wondered if she should try dating women. Maybe then things would be different, she had thought.

Maybe, but probably not.

“Well?” She asked. “Aren’t you going to say anything?” She tried to look fierce as she hissed the words at him, tried to look menacing. She had already gotten him to let her turn around. She wasn’t about to let the jerkwad shoot her, too.

He put his gun down and took two steps closer to her, pinning her against the tree. Then the man placed his hands above her head, locking her in place. Before Emily knew what was happening, his mouth was pressed against hers, and she was getting the best kiss of her life.