Sunrise (21 page)

Desmond said, “Whatever.”

Dakota caught the beginnings of a snarl on Jamie’s face. He shook his head slightly, just enough for his boyfriend to catch the point. “Either of you want to sleep in the back tonight?”

No one answered.

A light blinked on in the distance.

Am I seeing things?
Dakota thought.“Did you guys see that?” he asked.

“See what?” Jamie asked.

“That light.”

“What light?”

“There.” Dakota pointed. “Look.”

Jamie waited. When the glimmer didn’t shine, he sighed and tilted his head slightly. “Really, Dakota, I’m not in the mood for—”

The flicker cut Jamie off midsentence.

“I saw it,” Desmond said. “You had to have.”

“I did,” Jamie said. “Start the truck.”

“What if it’s trouble?” Dakota asked. He thought of all those weeks ago in Steve’s apartment, when the gang had first showed up and their lights had lit up the night sky.

Steve.

He managed to hold back a tremble of emotion when Jamie pushed himself up in his seat and set his jaw. For a moment, he simply sat there, watching the distant light swing back and forth, then he knocked his knuckles on his window and shook his head. “If it’s trouble, we’ll handle it. Right now, I just want to figure out where the hell we’re supposed to go.”

Desmond flicked the key in the ignition and flashed the lights twice in response. The light in the distance stopped swaying, went out, then blinked back at them two times. “They see us.”

“Go,” Jamie said.

Dakota found himself wanting to cross his fingers as Desmond put the truck in gear and maneuvered back onto the road, toward the hill where the beacon of hope continued to glimmer in absolute darkness. He contained himself though, preferring reality to deal its dues than to wish for good with false superstition of childhood belief.

The pressure of Jamie’s hand falling over his knocked him from his thoughts. “We’re cool,” he said. “We’ve got guns.”

“And a truck,” Desmond added.

Dakota smiled.

The truck lurched up the hill as Desmond switched gears, then a tall wooden fence and a breathtaking pasture flashed into view.

“Like their own little Eden,” Jamie muttered, leaning forward as the beacon’s light tilted into the air and began to wave at them from the side of their road.

“What do I do?” Desmond asked, pushing his foot on the brake.

“Pull over when you get close enough,” Jamie said. “Roll my window down. If something goes bad, floor it.”

“Got it.”

Desmond switched to the lowest gear and pulled up to the side of the road.

His hand fell to the stick and put it into neutral.

Like a will-o-wisp slowly drifting across the horizon, the light moved forward until, finally, a Native American man with long white hair came into view. Jamie pushed his finger onto the passenger armrest and rolled the window down.

“Good evening,” the Native said.

“Evening,” Jamie said. “We’re kind of lost.”

“I can see that, sir. Not many people come back here. Not many people around to come back here either, if you think about it.”

“Can you help us? We’re trying to get the interstate.”

“I can help you,” the man said. He looked up the road, toward a hooded figure that stood near a gate with a lantern in his hand. “Go tell your father we have visitors.”

“Yes sir,” the figure said, turning to disappear up the road.

“Welcome to our home,” lantern-bearer said. “My name is Eagle. This is the Partridge Family farm.”

CHAPTER 7

“School’s in session,” Erik smirked, slamming the last curtain into the windowsill of Romero’s Charity High School’s teachers’ lounge.

“Never thought I’d be back so soon,” Steve chuckled, settling down into an armchair.

“Me neither,” Ian said. He took a moment to examine their surroundings before collapsing onto a couch. “Where we goin’ from here?”

“Idaho,” Erik said. “That’s been the plan all along.”

“You think Jamie will really be there?” Steve frowned. “I mean, I get the reason behind going, but it’s kind of a longshot to assume that’s where they’ll go.”

“He’ll be there. Jamie and I always told each other that if shit went down, we’d meet up back home. That’s Idaho.”

“I trust you.”

The venom in his chest still hadn’t died down. Nearly three days after being abruptly separated from the rest of their group, Steve still couldn’t quell the feeling of helplessness in his chest. He wanted so desperately for them to be together, for them to be safe and away from all the wrong in the world. Most importantly, though, he wanted to know that Dakota was safe.

“It’ll be good,” Erik said.

Steve sighed. “I miss him.”

“Who?”

“The kid.”

“I miss him too,” Ian said.

“He’ll be fine,” Erik said, slapping Steve’s shoulder. “Jamie’ll make sure he stays safe.”

“I don’t doubt that. He is the kid’s boyfriend, after all.”

“So,” Ian said. “Who all made it?”

“Other than us, Dakota and Jamie?” Erik asked. “I don’t know. Probably no one.”

“I heard Desmond yelling from the second floor,” Steve said. “That’s where Jamie took off with Dakota, so I’m sure he’s safe.”

“So that just leaves Dustin, Michael and Alexis,” Ian said. “Anyone know what happened to them?”

Both Steve and Erik shook their heads. “Wish I did,” Steve said.

“I’m sure they’re better off than we are,” Erik said. “If not, we can’t worry about it. I hate to say it, but I hardly knew any of them anyway.”

“No harm in the way you feel.”

“I feel the same way,” Ian confessed.

Steve sighed. He tilted his head back to look at the ceiling. At that moment, all he wanted to do was sleep.

We’ve been going for three days,
he thought.
You can’t expect yourself to be any better off than you are now.

“Our first priority after we leave is to get a vehicle,” Erik said, drawing both Steve and Ian’s attention toward him. “I say after we get some rest, we go down to the office and see if we can score a set of keys off a secretary’s desk.”

“You really think there’d be some there?” Ian said.

“There were cars in the parking lot, right?”

“That doesn’t mean someone left their keys.”

“With all the commotion that had to have been going on, I’d be surprised if there
weren’t
any.”

“This school wasn’t on the safe list,” Steve said, his words more a statement than anything. “I heard it on the radio.”

“That’s good to know. At least there won’t be a bunch of zombies.”

“Kid zombies,” Ian shivered. “Ugh.”

“Not a good thing to think about,” Erik agreed. His eyes sought out a single wardrobe in the corner of the room. “Let’s just lay down and get some sleep. We’ll think more about what we’re going to do in the morning.”

Night seemed to pass quickly. A moment, a second, a brief inhale and a strong exhale—you could live your whole life and no one would even begin to notice, let alone care what had just happened after you stopped breathing at twelve AM. Time is measured in math, not moments, and those few moments worth measuring are often reduced to numbers and lost in the back bins of some old closet.

Were someone to measure the moment three men woke in a high school teacher’s longue and prepared to make the flight of their life, they would have calculated their number, their age, and the statistics for how likely they were to survive the next three weeks. When they finished crunching the numbers, they would find that their chances of survival were little to none. Regardless, numbers had never stopped miracles, nor had there ever been a shortage of miracles in this world. Miracles didn’t need statistics. They just happened.

“This is what we’re going to do,” Erik said, pressing a finger to a fire escape diagram on the wall. “One of us is going to go up this long, center hallway and make a left once we find the janitor’s closet, then make our way down this corridor until we hit the front office. If we can’t find anything there, we’re going to start hitting classrooms one by one until we find something.”

“And if we don’t?” Ian frowned.

“Like he said,” Steve smiled, “there was too much commotion for anyone to be in their right mind. Someone had to have left their keys here.”

“I’m just sayin’, don’t get your hopes up. We might not find anything at all.”

“No point in having a pessimistic attitude,” Erik said, cocking his revolver and passing it over to Steve. “Who wants to go?”

“I will,” Steve offered. He took a moment to acquaint himself with the weapon before him—a classy, bronze-colored and red-handled gentleman’s revolver—before looking back up at the two of them. “What’re you guys going to do?”

“Ian and I are going this way.” Erik traced a loop near the bottom of the map. “There’s a cafeteria here. We should be able to find some supplies.”

“How do you plan on getting it out to the parking lot?”

“Other than carrying it? They should have a pulley, I suppose.”

“We’ll figure it out,” Ian said.

Steve shrugged. “I guess we’ll go then.”

He leaned forward, opened the door, and slipped out without another word.

Pale light seeped through frosted glass windows, casting the hallway in faint shades of grey and yellow. As Steve made his way down the hall, his heart in a less-than-stellar place and his mind in a heightened state of alert, he sighed when he found a classroom and couldn’t look in. It seemed ironic to think that such frosted glass was once used to keep someone from looking in at the people inside. Now with nothing to look in at, he wondered why anyone would ever feel uncomfortable knowing that someone was always watching out for them, especially at a school.

That’s the way the world used to work,
he thought, letting his gun hang at his side.
But not anymore.

Shaking his head, he readjusted his grip on the revolver and continued down the hallway, already well aware that his journey was much shorter than he had initially anticipated, though whether it was from the warped sense of distance on the teacher lounge map or the brief span of the hallways, he couldn’t tell.

“Doesn’t matter,” he said to himself. “Makes it easier for me to make it back if something goes wrong.”

A shadow flickered in the corner of the room.

He paused, raising his gun.

The light flickered once more and revealed a child’s poster dangling off the wall.

Thank God,
he thought, sighing, reaching up to wipe the single bead of sweat off his forehead.
Just a poster. A goddamn poster.

His relief was short-lived, however, when a thought struck him.

How could there be a draft if there was nothing for the air to come in through?

It’s a vent, Steve—get a hold of yourself. You know it’s a fucking vent.

He didn’t bother to dwell on his thought. He simply turned left and made his way down the hall.

She jumped him just as he pulled a key from the very back drawer in a secretary’s desk. Nails jagged and screams harsh, she grabbed his arm and spun him around, giving Steve just enough time to kick her away from him before he collapsed back onto the table.

“FUCK!” he cried, raising his gun.

A single swipe from her bony hand sent the revolver flying into the office windows.

The gun went off.

“Got it,” Ian said, loading the box up onto the pulley.

“Thank God,” Erik sighed, shaking his head.

“At least now we won’t go hungry.”

“Right about that.”

A gunshot went off.

Both men froze in place.

“You think Steve ran into trouble?” Ian asked quickly.

They both started running.

“Fucking
BITCH!”
Steve screamed, kicking her in the face as she came in for another attack. She flew back into another desk and went soaring over it, the momentum of such strike and impact sending her first onto the table, then back over it. This pause in activity gave Steve just enough time to throw himself from the desk and onto the floor.

Where the fuck is my gun?

The bronze metal glinted in the pale light.

He lunged.

A hand wrapped around his leg and began dragging him backward.

Kicking out with his opposite leg, Steve struck the corpse in the ankle, then brought his other foot into her crotch. She screamed—not in pain, but frustration—and tried to jump, but he braced his ankle against her leg and slammed his foot into her knee.

Bones cracked under pressure.

Both opponents screamed.

Her leg bowed back and sent her tumbling to the ground.

Steve rolled into the threshold, grabbed his gun, and fired three shots into her head.

“STEVE!” someone called. “STEVE!”

“I’m ok,” Steve gasped, heart thundering in his chest. “I’m ok, I’m ok.”

“What happened?” Erik asked, falling to his knees.

“She jumped me,” he said.

“You’re bleeding.”

Steve looked down. Fresh blood slicked through his fingers and onto the floor. He uncurled his fingers to find the key still in his grasp, the jagged tip embedded into his palm. “Fuck,” he laughed. “I still fucking have it.”

Ian hoisted Steve to his feet. “Can you get it out?”

Steve pulled the metal object out with a simple tug. He grimaced as a fresh bolt of pain bloomed in his hand.

Erik clapped Steve’s back. “We’ve got some stuff. Let’s go get it and get the fuck out here.”

Minutes later, they were loading the contents of the pulley into the back of an SUV when Ian gave a cautious glance back at the school.

“What?” Erik asked.

“I thought I heard something,” the big man said, muscles tensing in his upper arms.

“Was that the only one in there, Steve?”

“I don’t know,” Steve said, grimacing. His hand was still bleeding, despite the makeshift bandage Erik had made out of a piece of his torn shirt. “If there were more, I didn’t see them.”

“I don’t like this,” Ian said, heaving the last box into the back of the vehicle. “Let’s get the fuck out of here.”

“Agreed,” Erik said.

Steve gave the pulley one mighty shove and watched it roll off into the deeper part of the parking lot, then as it curved along the incline in the hill and stopped, only for it to begin to slowly turn.

Its front wheels shifted. The pulley reoriented itself, then began to slide down the hill, toward where a group of brand new cars sat parked in front of the school.

“Oh fuck,” Steve said.

“What?” Erik asked.

The pulley slammed into the back of a car.

The alarm went off.

A zombie long-rotten from the effects of the sun peeked over the back seat and screamed.

“FUCK!” Ian screamed.
“FUCK!”

A chorus of screams went up into the air.

“Shit shit shit!” Erik said, running around the side of the car. “GET IN!
GET IN!”

Steve threw himself into the backseat. Ian slammed the passenger door shut.

A group of infected came around the corner and threw themselves at the screaming vehicle.

“Shit,” Steve said, breathless at the sight before them.

“They didn’t see us,” Ian laughed. “The fuckers didn’t see us.”

“They’re gonna see us in a minute,” Erik said, sliding the bloodied key into the ignition. “We have to get out of here before more of them come.”

A second car alarm went off, followed by a third. Steve caught sight of the infected bouncing into the cars in their struggle to attack the first one, only further adding to the chain of events that drew dozens upon dozens of infected. A zombie would try to attack one car, get pushed back by the horde, then fall back into another, triggering its alarm before one of its brethren would repeat the same process.

In the front seat, Erik twisted the key in the ignition and the truck fired up.

Almost all of the infected in the lot raised their heads to look at them.

“Shit,” Erik breathed.