Authors: Megan Berry
The moans get louder; the zombies must have spotted Silas. I hear the faint retort of his muzzled pistol, and one by one the moans get less and less until everything is completely quiet once again.
I hear some rustling and then a large shadow fills the entrance of the tent, and I let out a squeak.
“It’s just me,” Silas says as he zips the tent back up and gets back into his bag.
“Thanks,” I murmur, but he only grunts in response.
The next time I wake up, it feels a little warmer and there is sunlight streaming through the thin tent walls. I open my eyes and see my breath billowing white from my mouth—not that much warmer, apparently.
I struggle to sit up and wonder why nobody woke me. My eyes land on Silas’s side of the tent, and I freeze. They didn’t wake me up because they’re still sleeping. Silas is sprawled out, shirtless, his sleeping bag pushed down to his waist like he’s oblivious to the cold. I don’t mean to look, but my eyes are drawn to his tattooed arms. He has a large dragon tattoo on his upper arm and shoulder, and the tail curves down his shoulder blade towards his chest. I follow it and discover another tattoo over his ribs. My eyes travel to his well-defined abdomen and the little trail of hair under his belly button that disappears into the sleep bag. I realize that I’m being a creep, and jerk my eyes hastily away from him and concentrate on putting my vest back on.
“Did you get enough sleep?” Silas asks, and I blush beet red;
he was awake.
I clear my throat. “It was alright,” I say, striving to sound casual as I stand up and grab my belt. I unzip the tent and beat a hasty retreat, stopping outside the tent to quickly loop it on.
I hear a rustle and wince, of course Silas is following me out.
“Morning sleepyhead,” Ryan says, and I spin to find him standing between a row of shelves with an armful of supplies. I feel a rush of guilt that I didn’t even notice he wasn’t in the tent.
“Hey,” I say and rush forward to help. I grab a couple of the fishing rods. “These are a good idea,” I tell him, since it is. We are going to a cabin with a lake. Fresh fish will be a great way to keep from starving. I was never a huge fan of fish before, but I’m more realistic now. I’ll eat whatever keeps the hunger at bay.
“You two slept late,” Ryan says, obviously not done with the previous topic. I walk away to set the rods over by the rest of the supplies we have stacked up, not looking at Silas.
“Zombies kept us up,” Silas mutters, and I hear Ryan let out a surprised sound in the back of his throat.
“I didn’t hear a thing,” he says.
“Six of them were at the front window last night—I took care of them,” Silas says, and Ryan walks over to the front of the store and peeks out the bars at the carnage.
“Shit, sorry man, you should’ve woke me up,” he says, and I finally peek at Silas just in time to see him shrug.
“Blondie was awake. I could have asked her for some back up if I’d needed it.”
I poke around in one of the shopping carts and tear open a box of chocolate power bars and take two, putting the second in my pocket and opening the other one with my teeth.
Silas isn’t acting weird, like he caught me ogling his body, so I relax a little. He must not have seen it because, knowing Silas, he would have called me out on it right away. I decide to chalk it up to a moment of weakness and pretend it didn’t happen. “We should get on the road as soon as possible,” I tell them, glancing at the battery operated clock on the wall and wincing when I see that it’s already nine. It’s like this mall is a time warp that I can’t escape from!
“It won’t take us too long to pack this stuff up—we might as well take as much supplies as we can,” Ryan says, motioning to the case of MRE’s in his hand. “I found a bunch more of these meals in the back. We should make sure we take them all.”
Silas grins like that’s the best news he’s heard in a long time, and I have to admit, it is pretty great.
“I’ll go and pull the truck around to the front of the store so we can start to load her up,” Silas says as he pops open the gate and slides it back into place. “Unlock the front door for me when you see me coming,” he tells me, and I nod.
I turn back and watch Ryan dump his stuff off in the pile. “This place is a gold mine,” he grins, and I feel my own mouth tug up in response. It is nice to have a bit of luck for a change. “I’m going to go get some more,” he tells me before disappearing into the back.
I wish I could follow him and see what’s back in the store room, but I need to wait for Silas. As soon as I get near the front door, the smell hits me and I wrinkle my nose. I stare down at the bodies of the six creatures that are so human like, but also so different. Their skin is mottled and grey, ragged and torn in various places, and worst is their eyes. They are black like the pupil exploded and filled all the white space with darkness. I tear my eyes away from their corpses when I hear Silas drive the truck around the corner. He’s followed by a couple of stumbling zombies who take up the rear like well-trained collies.
He ignores them and backs the truck up until the back end is only a couple feet from the door. I wince when I see him back over one of the zombies he took out last night. The tire struggles for a minute, trying to gain some traction, then goes right overtop its head, popping it like an enormous zit.
The zombies have fallen back a bit, since they’re much slower than the truck, and Silas gets out like he isn’t being stalked and doesn’t have a care in the world. I throw open the door and join him outside once I’ve carefully looked both ways.
I step over one of the zombies from last night and join Silas. I know he can take care of these zombies on his own, but it’s a teamwork thing. I don’t want him to start to think he can’t rely on me.
Silas has already taken out three in a nice neat row, so I aim my gun at the zombie on the farthest left, and miss. I hear Silas snicker, but I ignore him and line the shot up again. This time I hit him in the head and he goes down.
“Ha!” I exclaim, even though I know my marksmanship is really nothing to brag about. Silas chuckles as he takes out four more zombies without pause. “Show off,” I mutter as I scan the parking lot for anything else, but it seems pretty empty, for now.
I walk back into the store while Silas stops and drops the tailgate down before following me. “Load up Blondie,” he says, stooping down to grab a couple large cases of the MREs. I pick one up and am surprised by the weight. It has to weigh at least twenty lbs. Silas pulls himself up into the back of the truck with ease, and I’m relieved that he isn’t trying to get me back there again—I’ve had enough of the back of this truck to last a lifetime.
I pass him the box I’m carrying and then go back for more. We get about six boxes on the truck before our fan club finds us. Silas sees three of them in the distance, and we manage to pack a couple more supplies before they get into gun range. I don’t even bother trying because it’s a fifty yard shot, at least, and I know I’m not that good. I watch Silas take them out, and I feel some grim satisfaction.
“They never quit coming,” I complain to Silas, and he nods, leaning forward to spit off the side of the truck.
“Seven billion people in the world, I wonder how many of them are zombies.” he says, making me feel completely overwhelmed with just one sentence. I don’t see how the human race can survive against the odds if even half of those people are zombies.
We are sweating by the time we get the truck loaded up, and Silas secures everything with a ratchet strap. The clock on the wall is putting me on edge as I watch it creep up to 11:30 am. This is not the early start I’d envisioned, though I know these supplies are going to be invaluable.
“Ready to go?” I ask for the third time in the last half-hour, causing Silas to shoot me an annoyed look, which I blatantly pretend I don’t see.
“Ready,” Ryan affirms, holding the front passenger door open for me, and I’m touched. He’s letting me sit in the front, leaving the spilled gut, rotten gore covered backseat for himself.
“Thanks,” I say, touching his arm to show him that I know he’s sacrificing for me. Silas rolls his eyes at our human emotions and jumps into the driver’s seat, sliding on a pair of dark sunglasses he’s found somewhere in the mall.
“Let’s rock and roll,” he says, channeling every corny cliché I’ve ever heard, though somehow still managing to pull it off with his dark sunglasses and tight leather jacket.
“This year, please,” I snark at him to cover up my embarrassment over how hot I’ve been finding him lately. I should have never looked at him without his shirt on!
Silas gives the truck an excessive amount of gas before tapping his breaks, making my seat belt tighten uncomfortably around my chest. I look over at him suspiciously, and he’s grinning at my discomfort. Note to self: Stop pissing Silas off when he’s driving, or next time I might find myself kissing the windshield.
Silas rolls all of our windows down a crack to help with the overpowering smell of rotten asshole that has permeated the truck, thanks to the zombie showdown in the backseat, and then we are zipping our way back onto the roadway and the scenery is whipping by us fast enough that I finally let myself relax a bit.
We are back on the road, and we will find Abby at that cabin; I refuse to believe anything different.
We drive in silence until Silas reaches over and slides a cd into the six-disc changer, and fast-paced country music starts blaring through the speakers. I was never really a fan of country, but it’s nice to listen to something other than our own heavy breathing. I roll my window down a little more since we are on the wide open road, and it’s relatively safe. I close my eyes, focusing on the feel of the warm sunshine on my face even though the wind is a bit chilled.
Something hard pokes my elbow where it’s resting on the center console, and I open my eyes to see that Silas has reached into the backseat and pulled up a medium-sized Rubbermaid tote that is filled to the brim with boxes of AR-15 ammo and spare magazines.
“If you’re just gonna nap, you can do something useful and reload these magazines so we have some spares,” Silas says, his arrogant drawl igniting my temper.
I know we need these magazines in case something happens, but Silas demanding it makes me mad. I open my mouth to tell him to piss off or maybe shove the bullets up his ass, but the warm press of Ryan’s hand on my arm stops me.
I look back at him, and see he’s giving me a look. “I’ll help you,” he volunteers, grabbing a box of ammo and an empty magazine. I still want to yell at Silas, but I can’t really do it now without looking like a jerk.
I ignore Silas’s smirk and yank a black metal magazine out of the box and start pressing bullets into it.
Ryan and I fill an obscene amount of clips until we run out of magazines to load, and my soft, uncalloused fingers are starting to feel sore.
“You should do the nine mil casings next,” Silas says, turning down the music for the first time in an hour. I stare at him, my mouth open a little. “This isn’t nap time, Jane, this is a brief moment of peace we have before the next attack,” he says seriously, and I realize that he isn’t actually being a jerk…okay, he is still being a jerk, but at least he has a very real reason.
“Fine,” I moan, not wanting him to know that I suddenly agree with his point of view. Ryan pulls the tote into the backseat and stacks it before removing a similar tote from the pile beside him. It’s blue with a snap lid, and Silas has scribbled 9mm on the outside with a sharpie.
We fill as many magazines as we have, nineteen in all. My fingers ache from pressing fifteen bullets into each holder. Thankfully Ryan was here to help me do half, or I would probably have carpal tunnel.
I grab my backpack off the floor and throw in a couple extra mags while Ryan puts the tote back.
“Anything else, your majesty?” I ask, and Silas flashes me a grin. It’s weird seeing him smile so much.
“It’s about time you started to address me properly,” he says, making Ryan laugh. I reward Silas with a punch to his shoulder, which he overreacts to by acting like it’s killing him. After a few extra minutes of stray chuckling, we fall silent again listening to the music. My eyelids start to get heavy again, and this time Silas doesn’t feel the need to poke me awake with some insipid chore.
I’m woken up a couple hours later by Ryan’s voice. “Where are you taking us?” Ryan asks sharply from the backseat, and I crack open an eyeball to see what Silas is doing to us now. We are on a quiet road that has tall grass lining either side of the asphalt.
“What’s going on?” I ask, sitting up straighter in my seat. I look at Silas then back to Ryan, and they both look tense. I turn back to the front of the truck and freeze, not sure if I should believe my eyes. Looming up ahead I see the outline of buildings in the horizon. “What’s that?” I ask, grabbing the map and opening it to the course we painstakingly mapped out this morning.
I’m not sure where we are, but it doesn’t matter. At no point on this trip should we be heading into any towns.
“He took us off the route,” Ryan says accusingly, and I set the map down with shaking hands.
“Silas, why did you do that?” I ask, not understanding why he would risk our lives like this. We’d all agreed to avoid communities.
Silas blows out an annoyed breath like it’s paining him to have to explain himself. “This is the shortest route. It’s a small town so there won’t be that many Z’s. The route we picked was going to take us an extra two hours to go around this one itty bitty town.” My reasonable side is screaming at me to kick Silas’s ass, but the part of me that is agonizing over Abby is applauding him.
“You had no right,” Ryan says from the backseat, and I decide to jump on the bandwagon with him.
“Yeah,” I add, making Silas give me a sideways look.
“Jane, you know you want to get there faster,” Silas says, and I’m actually surprised by his use of my real name; I’ve gotten pretty used to Blondie.
“What town is this?” I ask, refusing to agree with him.
“Rockley,” Silas says, slowing down when we reach the town sign and parking just before we enter the town limits.
I study the shady, elm-lined streets up ahead and don’t see a lot of movement, but that doesn’t mean anything. “Population five hundred,” Ryan reads off the sign, and again I’m torn.
Five hundred people make for a pretty small town until you think that number might mean five hundred zombies chasing you down Main Street.
“We’re already here,” I say, not realizing I’m siding with Silas until the words are out of my mouth.
Silas jams the truck into gear and presses the gas. “We’ll be in and out,” he promises, and I turn to look at Ryan to make sure he’s okay with this. He has a mutinous look on his face.
“I don’t know why we bother agreeing on rules if he’s just going to break them,” Ryan complains when he sees me looking at him, and I nod. I do agree. Silas had no right to make these decisions without us, but now that we’re here, I can’t handle backtracking and wasting anymore time.
I hit the powered button and roll my window up further, just in case, as Silas takes us deeper into enemy territory. There is evidence everywhere of chaos and destruction. Bloated corpses lie in the middle of the street, obviously someone around here made a stand.
I turn away from the crows that are feasting on the rotting meat and worry for a second that this virus could jump between species. I push it to the back of my mind though. There hasn’t been any sign of that happening yet, and there is nothing I could do if it happened anyway. It’s best to stick to worrying about things I can deal with—like flesh-eating human monsters.
We pass a post office that is flying the American flag at half-mast. Zombies stagger around, turning to moan in our direction as we go flying by in the truck. I look around, keeping an eye on the dead, but also looking for signs that there are actual humans still alive here. I don’t see much movement other than the shuffling of the dead until we pass an alley and something draws my eye. It’s an odd shape and moving fast.
“I just saw something,” I tell Ryan and Silas, craning my neck back to try and get a better look.
“What was it?” Ryan asks, and I shake my head.
“I don’t know, but it was fast,” I say, my mind tumbling over what it could have been.
“Probably just a dog,” Silas mutters as he scans the area ahead of us, but I shake my head.
“It was bigger than that,” I object, and Silas looks annoyed.
“A zombie then,” he throws out, obviously ready to be done with this conversation.
“It was too fast,” I say, stubbornly refusing to let it go. “Zombies don’t run.” At least I hope they don’t, but what if they’re evolving?
“Just go back and look,” Ryan interrupts our argument to side with me, and I beam at him.
Silas looks like he’s going to ignore us, but he finally lets out a curse and cranks the wheel hard, doing a U-turn right in the middle of the street.
“Where did you see this zombie dog?” Silas mutters, and I ignore the creepy image his words conjure up and point to the narrow back street.
“Over there.”
Silas slowly steers the truck past the alley, and what we see makes my blood run cold. At first I think it’s a child-sized zombie, and that image is terrifying enough, but then I realize it’s actually a little girl running for her life down the middle of the alley with two large zombies in hot pursuit.
“Oh my God,” I manage to get out before my throat closes up with fright. Ryan jumps out of the truck, and Silas and I follow at a dead run.
“This way,” Ryan calls out, and the girl’s head whips around to see where the voice came from. Ryan waves, and the girl turns, her small legs pumping. From my peripheral I see Silas raise his gun.
I don’t think I would trust anyone but Silas to aim towards a little girl and not hit her. It feels like Silas takes forever to line up the shot, and I see why he’s taking the time to be sure, but with each passing moment I want to yell and shake him. His shot takes down the first zombie just as the second one reaches out and manages to snag the end of the girl’s long flyaway hair.
The girl cries out when she’s forced to stop running as her head is jerked backwards.
“Silas!” I yell, unable to contain myself any longer, and thankfully he quickly squeezes the trigger, putting a neat bullet hole in the center of the zombie’s forehead.
The little girl is pulled down with the corpse, and all three of us run forward as fast as we can.
“Are you okay?” I ask, reaching out to grab the girl’s hand to calm her while Ryan gently untangles her hair from the zombie’s rotten fingers. I scan her from head to toe looking for bites, praying that I won’t find any. “Did they bite you, are you hurt?” I ask, not seeing anything, but that doesn’t mean much, even a small scratch would be enough.
The little girl shakes her head, tears leaking down her cheeks. “My mommy tried to bite me, but I ran away.” My heart drops into my guts when I hear that. Ryan gets her hair free, finally, and I gently pull her to her feet.
“I’m so sorry,” I tell her, and she sniffles loudly, her blue eyes filling with a dam burst of tears.
I hear Silas’s gun go off and spin around to find him firing down the alley towards the truck. A group of three zombies are blocking our way, and a fourth is down on the ground thanks to Silas.
“I hate to break this up, but we gotta go,” Silas yells, starting to jog towards the truck, firing as he goes. I don’t pull my gun out because I have my arm around the girl’s shoulders, and I’m pretty confident in the boys’ ability to protect us, as long as we don’t run into too many zombies.
The girl is a little too slow for a life or death run down the alley, so I reach down and pick her up, hoping I can shield her from some of the traumatizing views. She tucks her head into my neck, and I’m glad she can miss at least a little bit of this gruesome stuff. We reach the truck without further incident, though we have definitely attracted some unwanted attention; zombies are starting to stagger out of buildings and yards.
When I open the truck door and try to climb in, the little girl, who was clinging onto me, starts to struggle. “What are you doing?” I gasp, having to do a crazy juggling act to keep from dropping her on the ground.
“I’m not supposed to get in a truck with strangers,” the girls says, absolutely astounding me.
I look over at the zombies and then back at the small, earnest face in my arms. “We are the good guys, okay?” I say, trying to think of something to say that will convince her. “We are trying to save you from those scary guys over there.” I look into her big blue eyes and see she is still having some doubts.