Lost in the Apocalypse (6 page)

“Wake up,” Neil said, shaking Emily’s arm. She opened her eyes and peered up at him. Rays of sun streamed down into the basement from the two stairwells.

“Go away,” Emily grumbled, frowning at him. She wasn’t ready to face the day yet. Not with him glowering down at her. Was this the same guy who had grabbed her and kissed her only yesterday? Or had she simply imagined that?

“Get her some coffee first,” Robert said from behind him. Emily couldn’t see his face, but she could hear the smile in his voice.

“Don’t,” she said, sitting up. “You have no idea what I would do for a mocha right now.” She turned back to Neil and mouthed “anything,” but got up and walked away before she could see his reaction. She took the can of caffeinated soda from Robert. It was a brand she’d never heard of. Not coffee, not even close, but it would do.

She popped the tab listened to the sound of fizzing she hadn’t heard in weeks. Finally, she tasted it. The soda was warm, but sweet, and it got the job done. She shot Robert a grateful look and finished the soda. She should have savored it, but she was hungry and thirsty and tired.

Emily set her empty can aside and walked upstairs to survey the damage. She wasn’t sure if there had been multiple tornadoes or just a bad wind storm. This was Kansas, so it could have been anything: thunderstorm, lightning storm, ice storm, fucking zombies.

She looked around and immediately saw that the truck was toast. Her heart sank. A tree had landed on it.

“The one fucking tree on this whole property,” Butter growled, pointing at it. He was standing behind the truck with one hand on his hip. The whole situation was so ridiculous that Emily almost laughed out loud. It was just her luck, really.

Her sister was dead and she had made it home just in time to find her house overtaken – not by zombies, but by soldiers – and now her ride was gone.

Just her luck.

She walked down the few steps to the grass to see what everyone else was doing. Cody and Kari were walking the property, taking out Infected with baseball bats.

“I see the storm brought us some friends,” she commented, but didn’t make a move to help. There weren’t very many and the duo seemed to be having a good time taking out their aggression.

“Some storm,” Butter muttered, glaring at the car. They stood in silence and watched as Cody and Kari killed a few more Infected. No one wanted to waste bullets killing them, not when they were so damn slow. Kari lifted her bat and swung with impressive accuracy, hitting an Infected in the head. You always had to go for the head.

“Messy, but effective,” Kari said when she turned back to the group. She was covered in blood. She didn’t seem to mind and stripped out of her clothes, oblivious to the fact that the group was standing in front of her.

“Years in the military,” Butter shrugged when Emily gave him a questioning glance. “You get used to no privacy real quick.” Kari walked inside and Emily followed her, trying to avert her eyes, but it was no use. There was too much nudity and not enough other stuff to look at.

“Truck’s done,” Butter told Neil when he came inside. Kari rustled through a bad, presumably looking for clothes. She pulled out a shirt and yanked it on. It was too big, but she didn’t seem to notice.

“Figures,” Neil muttered, kicking the wall. His boot left a small hole in the sheetrock. He glared at it, as if it were the wall’s fault for breaking and not his fault for putting his foot there.

“We could go back to my place,” Emily offered. She wanted to go home. Even though she knew she wasn’t going to be able to get rid of the ex-airmen that quickly, maybe being around other people wouldn’t be so bad. Neil seemed surprise at her offer and raised his eyebrows, but she just shrugged. “We can’t stay here,” she said. “The road’s too close to the house.”

“She’s right,” Cody said. “Storm’s barely over and I already saw a car go past.”

“A car?” Now Emily was the one surprised. Who would be driving way out here?

“Guess the house looked fucked up enough that they didn’t stop, but we should get going. Standing around we’re just sitting ducks waiting to get picked off.”

Kari finished dressing and grabbed her bag. She walked to the door and looked back over her shoulder.

“You guys coming or what?”

Emily followed her out the door and the group gathered again. Emily’s house was only two miles away and the walk back took about half an hour with their heavy packs. She was tired and sore from her recent journey, but it wasn’t really the time to complain.

When they got back to her home, she realized it had been a good choice to find a basement during the storm because her home was gone.

The barn was in shambles and her mailbox was still there, but the cabin itself had collapsed. There was nothing left to salvage. Even if she had been a woodworker or a construction worker or a fucking farmer, she wouldn’t have been able to rebuild the cabin from what was left.

It was destroyed.

She stood at the end of the driveway and considered her luck. Who else would something like this happen to?

“Fucking tornadoes,” Robert said, placing a gentle hand on her shoulder. She appreciated the sentiment, but was feeling more angry than sad. She had lost her sister and now her home. The only things she had left were in a nasty duffel bag that was already covered with grime.

She glanced at the barn, but knew they couldn’t stay there. Not long term. Not in this world. Without a car, they’d be stuck in the middle of nowhere if anything went wrong. No, there weren’t many Infected out here, but there also wasn’t a lot of food and it was already September. There wasn’t exactly a lot of time to plant a garden and play farmer before the first cold front came in.

She turned back to the group and took a deep breath. If they were going to survive, they would need to get out of Howe together. They were a strong, sturdy group. They could get to safety somewhere. Then, if they wanted to split up and leave Emily behind, they could.

But they were taking her somewhere.

She wasn’t worried about being alone. Not really. Emily had been alone for most of her life. While Melanie had always had large groups of friends and enjoyed the company of boys and girls and gone to parties, Emily had been focused on studying. She had been focused on her writing. She had been focused on creating a career that would put her stories in bookstores and get her appearances at conventions.

The loneliness had never bothered her.

Now Emily worried not about being alone, but that if she was left at her cabin by this group of survivors, she would simply think about her sister until she picked up the gun and joined her.

She couldn’t give up that easily. Not after all they’d overcome.

Emily turned back to the group.

“Where are you guys from?” She asked.

“Not really the time for small talk, princess,” Robert grunted. Emily glared at him.

“I’m asking so I know where you guys have been. I’ve been that way,” she pointed north, toward Howe. “It’s four miles from here to Howe. Road blocks. Broken cars. Abandoned houses. Some Infected, but not many.”

“What was the population pre-infection?”

“15,000,” she said.

“And that’s not many to you?”

“My sister was in Worthington,” Emily said. “I went there and back. Howe is nothing compared to Grimsby.”

Neil let out a long, low whistle. Everyone stared at her for a minute. Finally, Kari spoke.

“We came from the west,” she said. “I-70 isn’t nearly as desolate as it should be. Lots of farms and empty spaces, but some of the small towns have banded together to either kill anyone who tries to come through or to scare them off. No one wants to share resources.”

“We got lucky a few times,” Butter commented. “But only at the beginning. The more time went on, the stingier people got.”

“With what?” Emily prodded.

“Information, food, everything.”

“Your base was out that way?” She turned to the west, as if she could picture where they had come from.

“In Colorado, across the border.”

“So north is out, and west. We can go south, but there’s not really anything there. I suppose it depends on whether we want to find a place to shack up or whether you guys are on some special quest to figure out what started the apocalypse and how you can save humanity.”

Neil glared at her.

“I’m no hero,” he said. “We go east.”

Surprised there wasn’t any arguing or discussing, Emily silently grabbed her bag and followed the rest of the group down her driveway and up the road. At the first intersection, they began walking east on a gravel road Emily had only driven down a few times.

The group walked in silence for about an hour. Their pace was steady, but tiring. They weren’t running, by any means, but Emily’s exhaustion was beginning to catch up with her. It was difficult to keep up with the airmen. It was difficult to accept the fact that she didn’t have as much training as them. She had never considered herself to be out of shape, but soon, every step was a struggle. Her feet were sore and she was sweaty, but the group pressed on.

Nobody talked.

It gave her plenty of time to think about what she wanted to do with her life and how she had failed up to that point.

Who was she going to be now?

She had been on “go” mode for the last month. Since the first reports of a deadly infection had started to roll in, Emily had barely slept or eaten. Her clothes were baggy and her hair was stringy and greasy. She suspected she’d have dreadlocks before long.

All she wanted to go was curl up in front of a fireplace with a kitten and just sleep until the world came back.

Only the world wasn’t coming back.

“These roads are shit,” Cody observed after awhile. He kicked a loose piece of gravel and it went careening into a ditch. Only a month, and it was already overgrown from rain. The road looked much more abandoned than it actually was. It looked like no one had driven down it in years: not weeks.             

“Yeah, they really aren’t used for much,” Emily said.

“Not too many people driving around in rural Kansas?” Neil asked with a twinkle in his eye.

“Not anymore.”

“What about before the apocalypse?” Kari asked. She hoisted her backpack up over her trim hips. Emily thought that in a former life, Kari could have been a model. She knew the woman had been a airman, but she carried herself with such grace.

Was that a byproduct of military training or something more?

“This land is all owned by a guy who is never around,” Emily pointed to the right side of the road. “And I have no idea who owns that,” she pointed to the left. “You have to remember that land is high value property. Even if you don’t put anything on it, you keep it for hunting or fishing or just to say you’re a landowner.”

“Seems like a good place for squatters,” Robert frowned, staring into the lightly wooded area. This part of the road had many trees, but wasn’t so thick they would call it a “forest.”

“When I first moved in, the sheriff came by to warn me that if I saw any campers on my property, I needed to call him right away,” Emily remembered.

“Campers?” Robert asked.

“Apparently there’s a problem with meth in the area. Well, there was. People would camp around and make it in tents. There’s so much empty land out here that most people don’t even notice if someone hangs around for a few days or even a week.”

Robert grunted. Emily made a mental note never to piss the guy off. He’d make a mean sheriff and an even meaner supervisor. She wondered what, exactly, he did in the military.

The group kept walking.

Minutes turned into hours and by the time the sun started to set, they were all exhausted.

“We need to find a place to hole up,” Neil finally said. They were at a four-way intersection. All the roads were gravel. “I know I’m not the most familiar with the area,” he admitted. “And we don’t have a fucking map,” at that he rolled his eyes and Emily wondered if there was a story behind that. “What do you think, Emily?”

Five pairs of eyes turned to her and she blinked, unused to the attention. She tried to recall which roads went where, but she so rarely came out this way on these back roads that she really couldn’t be sure.

“There’s a town that way,” she finally said, pointing south. “I’ve only been there once. Drove through it. I can’t remember exactly how to get to it.” She blushed. She was turning out to be a piss-poor guide. How had she managed to find her sister, again? Sheer dumb luck, was it?

“We don’t really want to be staying in a town, love,” Butter said gently, placing a hand on her shoulder. “Too many Infected and it’s probably got other scavengers close by. I haven’t seen a farmhouse in over two hours. Any idea which direction would be best for that?”

She thought for a moment, then pointed, once more, toward the town.

“There should start to be sparse houses as we near the edge of town,” she said. “And you have to remember that this is rural Kansas. When I say, “town,” I mean a population of 500. This isn’t Howe.” She smirked at Neil. “You guys really trying to tell me you couldn’t take out a couple hundred Z’s by yourselves?”