Zocopalypse (15 page)

Chapter Forty-Two

~Before~

3 Weeks Ago

My mother finds me coated in blood, standing over the remains of the Eater. My hands shake but never let go of the hatchet.

He’s dead for real now. I know that since I’m the one that severed his neck, but I keep going back to the restraints, even picking up the heavy chain, lifting his arm like a marionette.

“Someone did this,” I say trying to wrap my head around it. Who had restrained him and how had he gotten loose?

“Come on,” my mother says leading me toward the house with her flashlight. To my surprise she pushes open the back door. I stop abruptly, yanking her back.

“We can’t go in there.”

“It’s empty. We can.”

“How do you know?” I ask.

“I checked.”

I don’t believe her but at the same time anyone in the house would have heard me and the Eater fighting. It’s late, dark and the exposure of being outside freaks me out. Lacking any other option we go inside.

We enter a small room in the back of the house, closed up and dark. There’s another door that leads inside. It’s already shut but Mom secures the locks, pushing an ironing board across the door as well. That’s where we hole up, next to the washing machine and twenty cans of cat food.

“So I guess now I’m a murderer,” I say leaning back against the dryer. The metal flexes against my weight.

“No, you aren’t a murderer,” my mother says, while smoothing my hair out of my face. She pours a small amount of water on a (maybe) clean cloth and begins wiping my face. Dark red stains seep into the fabric. Gross. Eater guts. On my face.

“You and I both know those people aren’t really dead,” I say.

“They may as well be,” she says pushing and pulling at my skin. “It’s not like you had much choice.”

My mother the rationalizer can even make me feel okay about my first kill. It’s not just a character trait. It’s a superpower. The Rationalizer. Her cape would be made out of a sleeping bag, with a fluffy pillow attached.

“Why did the end of the world have to happen during the hottest time of the year,” I grumble taking a small sip of water from my bottle. The room is stifling hot, but I’m afraid to venture further into the house. I know there’s at least one other dead body in there and I have little desire to see it.

“I wasn’t sure how this was going to end,” she says, shifting my face left to right with her hand on my chin, inspecting. “But now I think we’ll make it. I think we will get to the cabin and find your father.”

“Why?”

“Because every day we do something we think we can’t. We walk a little farther. We find food and water. Shelter. We’re not afraid to do what we have to—at least you aren’t.”

“I’m not sure I agree on that,” I say feeling increasingly unstable. The hot room. The sticky blood. The metal head I just decapitated outside. All of it is starting to completely fuck with my head.

But I don’t say that. I keep that to myself and instead say, “You’re getting better at this too.”

She smiles and continues to rub the blood out of my hair. I can tell it makes her happy to have a job—a motherly job. It’s the least I can do.

“There,” she says satisfied with the cleanup. She then makes her little pillow out of her sweatshirt and lies down next to a stack of cans with little gray and white cat faces staring at us in the glare of our flashlight. She closes her eyes and like that, she’s asleep.

Rest doesn’t come as easy for me, even in the seemingly safe room. Something about this whole place makes me nervous. The video and the chained up Eater. It feels off—weird and the feeling in the pit of my stomach coils tight like a warning.

Was the whole thing intentional or did we just stumble into another horrific example of collateral damage? It’s impossible to know and frankly we won’t know more until daylight. God knows what will be waiting for us outside.

I click off my flashlight and listen, faintly hearing the sounds of Roger Upton filter through the door. I don’t want to find comfort in his words but I do. He’s a talisman from the life before. When we held on to a glimmer of hope. Where the warm blue light of the TV made me feel safe. I take a deep breath and strain my ears, listening to his words, allowing them to soothe me.

It’s crazy. I feel crazy, but at the moment it’s all I have.

Chapter Forty-Three

~Now~

From the bed I hear Cole fill a plastic cup with water from the sink. He brings it to me, helping me to prop myself up on the uncomfortable mattress. A long metal bar jabs into my back but I want to see him when he tells me the full story.

His hands are gentle as he positions me and again he checks the crook of my elbow where the Drones drew the blood. “Cole,” I say trying not to be annoyed. To be honest it’s nice to have someone fuss over me. “Stop procrastinating. Just tell me. What do they want from me? Why all the blood withdrawals?”

He sits back on the floor, knees up, pressing his back to the wall. “I took the job as a basic lab assistant—just to make some extra money during school and get a foot into the research world. Being in Liberia during the Ebola outbreak gave me a crash course in medicine—I wasn’t a doctor yet, but I saw and did things there that would take a lifetime of work to experience here, if ever. What really inspired me though, was finding a cure—the research side. Watching those people succumb to this terrible disease made me want to stop it at the source.”

He takes a deep breath before continuing, “Getting an assistant position with your father was huge—but you know that. He’s literally the biggest name in parasitology. He’s made amazing strides and it’s no surprise the public and private sector were fighting over him. Unfortunately, the PharmaCorp not only had the money, they had ties to a terrorist group that were willing to risk humankind to further their cause.”

“What do you mean terrorist groups?”

“They call themselves patriots. Nationalists. Whatever they are they’re extreme—outside the mainstream military for sure,” he answered.

“But what does any of this have to do with me and all the tests?” I ask. “Because trust me, I know how amazingly amazing my dad is.” I’d spent a lifetime second fiddle to his career. Even now, in the possibly post-apocalyptic world he overshadows the rest of us.

“When PharmaCorp sold the E-TR virus to the patriots that dropped the virus on Boko Haram. As horrible as that group is the virus was too unstable. Your father knew it would spread and he was right. It rippled across Africa and then across the rest of the country. Your father started to scramble to create an antidote and vaccine. He needed a test subject and he included his family. If anyone was going to have the active antibodies needed to fight this it was going to be you and your mother.”

“Holy crap. Are you saying I’m immune or something?” The intrigue only lasts a minute when I think about my mother. A lump forms in my throat. “Oh, my God, my mom. Was she immune? Did I k—k—kill her for...”

I lurch forward. Every ounce of fluid barreling up my throat. I race to the bathroom, nearly falling over twice but Cole is right behind me keeping me steady. I vomit into the toilet, a rush of water and not much of anything else.

“Alex, no,” he says pulling my hair off my cheeks. “God, no. She wasn’t immune. Remember? He excluded her from the experiments months before your final injections.”

Relief washes over me, but it doesn’t stop another wave of nausea. I steady myself against Cole, who hasn’t taken his hands off of me. Once I’ve gained my footing he wets a towel and I use it to clean my mouth and face.

Helping me back to the bed he says, “Your mother wasn’t a good test subject. But you? You were his golden ticket. Your body reacted to the vaccine, therefore altering your body to help create the antibodies needed to help others fight the virus. At least that was the ultimate hope before he got shut down.”

I try to let that sink in but it’s too big. “If all of that is true then why shut Dad down? Why not let him finish what he started?”

Cole shakes his head. “I’m afraid those are government secrets above any level I’d have access to.”

I narrow my eyes. “Yeah, you know an awful lot for a basic lab guy. Who told you so much?”

“Your dad. When we left your house that day he asked me to follow up on you. He told me about the,” he touches his chest, still aware that we’re probably being watched, “stuff.  When you and your mom took off I followed.”

“Why?” I say leaning toward him. “That had to be outside of what he was talking about. He would never ask you to leave your life behind to follow my mom and me on a suicidal mission.”

“The world as we know it is over, Alex. You may be the one thing that can help us. On a professional level, I have an obligation to see this through—to your father and to humanity as a whole.” His eyes flick downward, toward his hands that have been worrying the Army green fabric of his pants. He speaks again, this time his voice rough and deep, “On a personal level? I knew I wanted to know more about you the first day you stepped into my lab. If the world is going to shit, and it’s very likely that it is, I want to at least have taken a shot.”

I blink, totally overwhelmed by all of the information he just shared—especially that last bit. I try to say something impressive and forget the fact Cole just saw me hurl my guts out in the other room. I open my mouth. “Uh—that’s uh…wow,” is the brilliant statement that comes out.

Regardless of my stupidity, Cole laughs and I see the brightness of his eyes and I realize he’s right about one thing. We’ve got one life to live here and it may be more important than I’d ever realized.

“Well,” I say regaining a little composure. “We need to come up with a game plan. For my dad and Mom, and everyone else that had sacrificed.”

He nods. “I agree.”

“First things first,” I say. “Getting out of here. Dad gave me strict instructions to find Jane, not to find Colonel Asshat. For whatever reason that is not what he wanted me to do.”

“Agreed,” he says again.

“Do you have any ideas?” I ask, hopeful that he’s one step ahead of me—that he spent the day in here plotting our big escape.

He scrunches his nose and says, “Nope. I’ve got nothing.”

I sigh. “Guess we’ll have to come up with one then.”

The sharp click of the lock on our door forces us to both stop talking. Walker enters the room with a two plates of food. One has some sort of grits or oatmeal with a small piece of meat and what appears to be canned cooked carrots. The other plate is the opposite. It looks absolutely delicious—lots of meat and greens.

“Eat up,” she says handing the better looking plate to me. “You’ve got another round of withdrawals coming in an hour. They want you ready.”

“What the hell?” I ask. “Are they fattening me up for slaughter?”

Walker turns to leave without another word and shuts the door with a harsh, echoing click.

Chapter Forty-Four

~Before~

3 weeks ago

At daybreak light filters in a small vent at the top of the wall where the dryer exhaust funnels outside. Inch by inch the light creeps across the floor until it lands directly on my mother’s face. I don’t wake her. I don’t move.

“Hey girl,” she says, stretching on her back. Her bones crack, shifting with age and she groans against the stiffness of sleeping on the floor. She blinks several times, acclimating to the light. If she’s anything like me every time she wakes up she has to reconcile the world we now live in. A heavy line creases across her forehead. “What’s wrong?”

I pull my knees up to my chin and wrap my arms around them. “Where do you think the cats are?”

“What?”

I gesture to the tower of food. “The cats…where do you think they went in all this?”

She looks at the food as though it’s the first time she’s noticed it. It probably is. “Cats are pretty resilient. They’re probably hunting mice in the fields.”

I stare at the cans. Then down at my toes. Then at the door where Roger Upton stopped talking some time ago. I hope the battery died. I hope there’s no one on the other side of the door.

“I don’t think I can do it.”

“Do what?” she asks more awake now. She bends her knee, grimacing a little at the stiffness.

“This. This whole thing anymore. The killing and the running.”

Her stomach makes a noise—a gurgle of hunger. She rummages in her bag and digs out a couple pieces of bread and a jar of peanut butter. I watch her slowly spread the brown butter with a plastic knife across the crumbly, drying out bread. She hands me one and takes a bite of the other. I watch her chew, taking her time until she finally says, “I don’t want to do it anymore either, but…”

“No buts,” I say. “Let’s just…stop. Can we stop?”

She holds me in a stare, the kind that she gave me when I lied about my book report in the third grade and forged her name. She found out and made me apologize to my teacher. It’s the look that says ‘I know you don’t want to do this but you have to do this so suck it up, Alex. We can’t stay in a laundry room forever with stale air and nothing to eat but cat food and.’

“I know you’re tired, honey. And scared. I’m terrified.”

“So, let’s give up. Can we not give up?” The words sound rational in my head but crazy once they leave my mouth. I know you can’t just stop. It’s not the Ramsey way. That’s not how you get to be valedictorian.

She reaches for me, her warm hand covering mine. “We can’t give up. We promised your father. We owe it to your sister.”

Jane. For some reason I try not to think about her. She’s all alone in the middle of a big city with no support. Dad obviously looped her in on this thing too—he made that clear before he left but does she know that? What did he tell her?

But most of all I worry I’ll never find her or worse, that there’s no one left to find.

I know that I’m just having some sort of breakdown, although at the same time I think the reality of life has finally hit home. The one where Roger Upton is a thing of the past. Where chained up Eaters are my present. And killing things—yes things—is definitely the future.

“We won’t be the same people when we find them,” I say examining the bread and tearing off a small corner turning green with mold.

“No, I don’t suppose we will be,” she says. “Maybe we’ll be better.”

I shove the sandwich in my mouth and force down the dry bread and gooey peanut butter. Even now my mother lives in a fantasy but maybe that makes her better equipped to deal with all of this?

“Something is really bothering you—other than what you’ve said. What is it?”

I look down at my hands and say, “What if one of us gets attacked? What if we get sick?”

“Then I guess we’ll do what we have to.”

“Which is what?” I know what but I need to have this conversation. I want to know what is expected of me. “Because I don’t want to get left out there in a silly kitty cat shirt trying to eat people. I don’t want that to happen.”

My mother reaches for me. She pulls me close and into a tight hug. With as much time as we’ve spent together lately it hasn’t been like this. “Alexandra, I know you think I’m a mess and I’m flaky and read too much.”

“No-” I argue.

“You do,” she says but laughs. “It’s true, but I’m also a mother and to be a mother you have to have a lot of strength. I have the strength to take care of us when I need too.”

I know she means that she’ll take me out of my flesh eating misery. I nod. “I guess that means I have to be ready too.”

“Yep.”

We sit together quietly until she says, “Come on,” and shakes her head at the tower of cat food. “Let’s get out of here. All those little yellow eyes are freaking me out.”