The Awakened (11 page)

“EVERYTHING,” I BLURTED OUT. “WHERE
did they come from? What is going on? Where are we going? What are we going to do?”

“Yeah, everything,” Ash echoed, scooting forward on the seat to get closer. His eyes were intent on both of us.

Dad ran a hand through his hair, and I noticed for the first time that there were streaks of gray there that hadn’t been there before. My dad was not even forty, yet the world had given him gray hairs.

“They estimate about a third of the population has gotten the Z virus…”

“Wait, the Z virus?” I immediately interrupted. “What…the Z virus?”

A corner of his mouth turned up. “It’s what they called the virus, or at least what they call it because they have all awakened as zombies…hence the “Z” part of the Z virus.”

I really hoped that Ash would now stop calling me “Z.”

“But they call them Awakened?” Ash said, voicing my own confusion before I had a chance to.

“It’s confusing. I know. The virus is called the Z virus. The victims that are awake and walking around are called Awakened. I didn’t make it up,” he said roughly.

“I’m just saying, the name ‘Z virus’ isn’t very original,” I muttered. My dad shot me an impatient look, so I shut my mouth and motioned for him to continue.

“Like, I was saying, they’re saying that it’s affected about a third of the population, maybe more. It’s mostly congregated in the areas with a bigger population, the cities they ultimately decided to eliminate. There’s no way to tell how many of them have been awakened, but it seems to be about 90% of them. They have completely overrun the urban areas.”

He sighed. “With about 100 million people out there with the ability to run faster than a normal human being and the desire to use their new razor sharp teeth to tear through human flesh, they obviously felt that it was a decision they had to make.”

With the pain and shock of the recent demolition of the city I had grown up in, I didn’t necessarily agree with that assessment. However, I kept my mouth shut so that he could continue.

“Everyone is insanely concerned about the fact they all seemed to awaken at the same time. Of course, that means when they got sick or when they died doesn’t give us any clue to why or how this happened.”

He sighed again, frustrated, and it sounded loud in the nearly silent car. “We were at the station, normal day. I was trying to keep up with the numbers, trying to see how badly this had affected our city when we started getting the phone calls. I immediately turned on the TV, and there was coverage everywhere, showing the Awakened. I was so…caught off guard. I’ve seen my fair share of shit here in New York but I’ve never seen this before and I couldn’t think.”

“Then you called me. I was so relieved. You told me about Madison, and I knew immediately what the media hadn’t quite figured out yet. The Awakened were the virus victims, and they had somehow come alive again. I knew that we had to go; we had to go now, and that’s when they hit the station.”

“It was like it was planned. A group of them came in, quiet, nearly hidden. They were on us before we even knew they were there. They’re so fast, sneaky, and they took down Briggs before we could even react. And we just started shooting, trying to take them out.”

He stopped and looked at both of us, and his tone shifted. He slipped into a sterner voice, dropping the slower lilt of a storyteller. “This is important. If we had known, if we had figured it out sooner, we wouldn’t have lost so many people at the station. Are you listening?”

We both nodded, looking like bobble heads. I felt a sudden urge to giggle at this and had to stamp it down.

“You need to be specific when you kill them. The head or the back of the neck. Every time,” he explained.

“Okay, the head makes sense,” I said quickly.

“But the back of the neck? How does that even make sense?” Ash chirped in.

“Yeah, I know,” my dad said, shaking his head. “It was an accident. We just started shooting, and we were hitting their arms and their legs, their chests or their backs, and they just weren’t going down unless we hit them in the head, directly in the head. We discovered the back of the neck on accident. Dolan was engaged in a kind of hand-to-hand scuffle with one of them, and he had another one creeping up behind him. I shot him, but I wasn’t aiming well and hit him right in the back of the neck, and he went straight down.”

“Are you sure though?” I asked. “That was one case. And does it have to be a gun?”

“I tried it a few more times on the way to the brownstone to get you and Ash. The head and the back of the neck. There’s no other way, not that I know of. As far as whether it has to be a gun, I don’t think so.”

I started to feel panic. It was incredibly specific. We were running away from the central centers of outbreak, but I had no idea if we would run into any more Awakened while on the road. There was no telling if their population was decimated in the bombs. If I ended up in a scuffle with them, I had more of a chance at slowing them down but not stopping them from getting me. “Dad, my aim…it just isn’t that great…” I said softly, my hand going to my holster reflexively.

“We’re going to work on it,” Dad said, sighing. “We’ll work on yours, and we’ll have to teach Ash. And we’re going to work on defensive fighting too.”

“Well, at least I have practice in that,” I said, under my breath. I knew I could hold my own against a human with average strength. I didn’t know what the strength of an Awakened was, but I imagined it would probably be above human capabilities. It was my gun skills that were causing all the problems. “So…Nebraska?”

Dad nodded, turning the car on again. The familiar scent of gasoline and exhaust filled the air, and he started to back out of the woods, slowly, navigating around trees and roots and other obstacles in our path. “It’s the safest place. There’s been talk…of a place in Colorado, near Mesa Verde National Park, a sanctuary that has been built to be a safe zone.”

“In three days, someone built a place to escape to?” I asked, skeptically. “It just…doesn’t seem that likely.”

“Rumor is that they built it years ago in event of any sort of catastrophe. Colorado is a rich, abundant area, but far enough from the coast, in case of, I don’t know, tsunamis or some other natural disaster,” he explained, finally making it to the edge of the road. It was pitch black, not a light in sight. We were far enough away from the local town to be blind to its light and there were no other cars on the highway. “It’s a bunch of bullshit, people reaching out for something to have hope for in hopeless times. We’re going to Nebraska.”

He flipped his turn signal, most likely out of habit, and pulled back onto the winding road. I let us get a few miles, nearly to the town, when I asked one last question. “And…and the bombs?”

“After we had holed up in the station for three days, we were ordered to evacuate the stations, go home and lock ourselves in the house. That’s the sort of order they’ve announced all over the country, to go home and lock yourself in. I was about to leave, but I wanted to grab a few things. I heard the commissioner, and I wondered why he hadn’t left.”

“I stopped, thinking maybe he needed help, but he was on the phone. I was surprised because the phones had gone out, or so I thought. I’m not sure who he was talking to, but I heard enough to figure out what was going on. They were giving up. They wanted to control the Awakened population as much as they could. Bombs were going to drop at nineteen hundred hours, which gave me a short window of time. So I crept away, grabbed the car that I had been stocking for our departure and came to get you.”

“Now, go to sleep, both of you,” he said. “I’m going to stop in a few hours, and we’ll take turns keeping watch. I need sleep too.”

“Okay,” I whispered, resting my head on my hands against the door.

“Oh, and, Zoey?”

I looked up at him, waiting for a “good night” or an “I love you,” maybe even an “I’m sorry.” Instead he said in a very defeated voice, “Merry Christmas.”

I felt my eyes fill, and I turned away from him, drifting back to sleep, hoping that it would be dreamless.

A COUPLE HOURS LATER, I
felt a hand shaking me awake. I jumped, startled, my hand immediately going to my gun.

“It’s fine. It’s just me,” Dad said, soothingly. “I need some sleep. I haven’t really slept in days. Do you mind taking watch?”

I nodded, rubbing the sleep from my eyes. I glanced at the backseat, where Ash was stretched out. His mouth was hanging wide open, and I wondered for a moment if he drooled. I smiled a little and adjusted my seat so that I was sitting upright. Dad lay back in his own seat and was passed out in seconds.

It was still dark outside, and we were in the middle of nowhere, no lights around to permeate the blackness that pressed against the windows. I pulled my phone out of my back pocket to check the time; it seemed to be the only purpose for keeping it now. The numbers blinked up 4:32 a.m. at me, and I was surprised at how long my dad had been driving and how close we were to morning.

I did the math in my head, trying to figure out where we could possibly be. There was still a thick forest around us, so we hadn’t come near the flat plains of the middle states. We’d driven for about two hours before stopping for supplies, and my dad had driven for roughly eight to nine hours. I guessed we were somewhere in Ohio, maybe even Indiana. That left us with a lot of ground left to cover, at least 16 hours left in the car. We were all so exhausted, and I didn’t know how fast we could make it there without making any stops.

I wondered for a moment whether my mom was even alive. I doubted that the Z virus had reached all the way to the tiny town of Constance, but how did I know? How did I know that Awakened hadn’t escaped from the larger cities into the flatlands of the Midwest? Everything was so uncertain. The phones didn’t work, and we had already tried the radio. Either we were too far from a signal, or they just didn’t work at all. I didn’t want to think about the fact that there was probably no one there to broadcast.

I looked back again and smiled slightly at Ash. His mouth was still hanging open, and drool was pooling down the side of his mouth and onto the thick, black upholstery. He looked so different in sleep, softer and more vulnerable.

I wasn’t happy that he was along for the ride, that was my dad was now responsible for his safety too, not with the way he had treated me my entire life. But I was also happy that he was alive. He had been spared over millions of people in the city. He had no one left; his parents had been in the city when it had been bombed and torn to pieces. He hadn’t even had time to accept it before being thrown in the back of an SUV and taken away from the life he had always known.

His eyelids fluttered a little and then flew open. He smiled when he saw me looking. I felt a small smile creep across my own face.

“Hey,” he said softly. “What’s going on? Why are you staring at me?”

“I wasn’t staring at you,” I whispered back. “I’m on watch. I was looking around.”

His smile grew a little wider. “Okay, Z.” He shifted upward, wincing a little. “Not the most comfortable bed. Is your dad asleep?”

I nodded. “Yeah, he drove for a while. He needs to sleep.”

Ash looked around, his eyes scanning our surroundings. The darkness was beginning to fade and there was a distinct pale shade to the sky as the sun began to rise. “Where are we?”

“I
think
Ohio,” I said softly. “But I’m not sure. We’re far from New York.”

He nodded, looking around some more. “You can go to sleep, if you’re tired. I’ll keep watch now.” He pulled his gun out from underneath his seat and put it in his lap.

“I don’t know if I can sleep,” I admitted. I felt more exposed with the rising sun, light pouring into the car. I was afraid. I was afraid that every moment that I was asleep, I would be vulnerable.

“You don’t have to sleep,” Ash said, stretching out his legs across the seats. He was too tall to completely stretch out, so there was a slight bend to his knees. “We could talk.”

“About what?” I scoffed. “You and I have nothing in common.”

He looked nervous for a second, his knees bouncing again. I was starting to notice little tics about him. “We might have something in common. That we could maybe talk about.”

“I don’t really feel like talking, Ash,” I said, quickly, turning back in the seat to face forward.

“Okay,” he said, softly, his voice drifting up to me. “We can stay quiet.”

“Okay,” I said, closing my eyes and falling into silence.

“RAISE YOUR ARM, ZOEY. WE’VE
been over this.”

I sighed.  My arms were heavy, but I raised them anyway. The bottle that my dad had set on the fence was several feet away. I had shot it at least five or six times already and hadn’t come close. There were a couple bullets lodged into the wood fence. I shot again and just caught the tip, and it went toppling over.

After my dad had woken up, the sun had risen high enough that he could no longer ignore it. I had thought he would start the car up again and head out. After about twenty minutes of driving, however, he pulled into a field and had started impromptu gun lessons.

“Great. Good job, champ. We still gotta work on that aim, but it’s getting better,” my dad said, his hands on his lips, gun holstered around his waist and to his ankle. He looked just like a cop, even without the blue uniform. “Come on, Ash.”

Ash stepped forward, looking nervous. He raised his arms, his eyes intent on the bottle, yards away. He shot and hit the fence underneath the bottle, wood splintering onto the ground. He shook his head, slightly.

“You’re fine. Try it again.”

Ash’s eyes met mine, and I nodded quickly in reassurance. He took his stance again, breathed in and out and then fired another shot. This time he hit the bottle squarely, and it went flying.

“Fantastic,” my dad said, a smile lighting up his face. He came over to stand next to Ash, clapping him on the shoulder. Ash allowed a small triumphant smile on his face as he looked up at him. They looked so much like father and son for a moment, their dark hair so similar, that I wanted to throw my gun at them.

I turned back to the fence, where one last bottle was standing. I aimed at it and raised my arm, just like I had been told a million times. A moment later, a tiny crack told me the bullet had made contact and the bottle landed a few feet away.

Dad and Ash looked up in surprise, from the fence to me. I walked past them, heading back to the car. “Yeah, I can hit the stupid bottle too,” I muttered as I passed them.

“Oh, come on, Zoey, seriously?” Dad said, his tone full of exasperation.

“I’m hungry,” I said as I slipped my gun back in its holster and opened the back of the SUV. I dug through the bins that my dad had stored there until I found one stocked full of dry food. I grabbed a pack of jerky and climbed up onto the tailgate and tore into the package.

Dad and Ash had come up right behind me, following each of my movements with keen eyes.

“What?” I said, chewing on a particularly tough piece of jerky.

“Ash, can you go gather those bottles up? Put the ones that aren’t too beat up back on the fence?” Dad asked. Ash nodded in response and walked away, his eyes lingering on mine for a moment. I looked away, staring at the gray sky in the distance. A storm was definitely coming.

Dad turned back to me. “What’s going on, kiddo?”

I sighed. “The end of the world, Dad.”

He gave me a look and hopped onto the truck bed with me. “Don’t coddle me, Zoe,” he said. “You’ve been in a mood all day.”

“I have
not
been in a mood,” I scoffed.

“You have been. You’ve been moping.”

“Moping! Oh yes, moping!” I said, throwing my hands out and nearly losing my grip on the bag of jerky. “I mean, Dad, it’s kind of the END OF THE WORLD. We have these Awakened everywhere, and they freakin’ blew up New York. We’re headed on this crazy cross-country road trip to Constance, to live with Mom and Caspar. So yeah, maybe I’m
moping
a little.”

“Yeah, all that, I get that,” he conceded. “But something more is going on here, and I think it has to do with that guy over there.” He indicated in Ash’s direction, who was busy lining the bottles back up.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I said, shoving another piece of jerky in my mouth, in the hopes that my inability to talk around a hunk of meat would indicate the end of the conversation.

“It’s not a competition,” my dad said firmly. “It’s about being able to defend yourselves. The Awakened are fast, and they can only be taken down in two ways. I want to make sure that, if we see any of them out here, that you guys will be able to take care of yourself.”

“I know,” I said, swallowing hard. “I know. I just…can you give me a little credit? I’m trying. I am. I know I’m not great at it, but I’m trying.”

“I know you’re trying,” he said, defensively. “I give you credit. I think you’re being dramatic, Zoey. You’re making this a competition when it doesn’t have to be.”

“But it
is
a competition,” I broke out. “It is! It always has been. I’ve been telling you nearly every day since Ash moved to New York that he teased me and made fun of me and played stupid pranks on me. I told you that I didn’t like having him around. And you always just loved him. You’re always talking about his stupid football or baseball accomplishments. You wanted him over for dinner. God, you wanted me to date him. You stuck me with him for hours a day for weeks while we waited to see what would happen with this stupid virus. So, yeah, maybe I’m just being a little dramatic because I’m so sick of all the Ash love.”

I hopped off the tailgate and started walking away. I was nearly back to Ash when my dad caught up to me. I looked up at him, and he wrapped his arm around my shoulders, tight. He didn’t say anything for a moment, but I knew. He was not an overly affectionate person, not one who was open with his words, but I knew. I nodded and stepped away from him.

“Let’s work on some hand-to-hand stuff,” my dad called out to us. “We won’t always be able to use our guns.”

Ash looked and nodded, sliding his gun into his holster. My dad had given us a variety of small knives, able to slip into a belt loop or into a belt. “I think I can handle that.”

I laughed a little at that but walked over to the fence and hopped onto it, ready to watch my dad and Ash go through basic movements in fighting and self-defense. I didn’t need him to tell me that I wasn’t needed. I knew enough from all the classes he was constantly making me take. Every once in a while I spoke up to correct Ash’s movements.

The day started to get a little warmer as the sun rose higher, and Ash peeled off his shirt and tossed it aside. I blushed a little at the sight of his nearly perfect body. It was unfair that he looked like this. People weren’t supposed to actually look like this. Perfectly tan, hard muscles, strong arms. I waved a hand in front of my face, hoping that it was the heat of the sun and not the near naked boy in front of me that was causing my face to feel so flushed.

After about a half an hour of practicing, my dad clapped Ash on the shoulder again. “You’re strong. It’ll be to your advantage once your strategy gets better. We’ll work more on it later. We have to get moving.”

We piled back into the car. I leaned forward to fiddle with the radio again but there was nothing but static. People were taking the president’s warning to heart and locking themselves down in the house. We drove in silence for hours, before my dad pulled off the road again, deep off the road.

Ash and I both looked surprised when Dad got out of the car.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

He poked his head back in. “We’re going to camp outside. We’re going to eat some food and be prepared the best that we can be. I’d rather be outside, ready to fight, than get ambushed in the car.”

I exchanged looks with Ash as we climbed out of the car and followed him into a clearing. He was already scrounging around for wood and tossing it in the center. It wasn’t long before he had a small fire going. It was freezing, and I pulled a blanket from the back of the car and wrapped it around myself.

After a small dinner of cold Spaghetti-os from a can, I curled up into a fetal position on the ground and drifted to sleep while staring at the fire, watching the flames flicker.