It was pitch dark under the trees, but there wasn’t any moaning. The chorus of postmortem exhalations from the zombies behind us grew louder and louder. My dad’s gun went off.
He was lowering the rifle when I turned. The zombies that I could still see in the field all turned toward us. The bullet thunked into the car or trailer at distance. “Dad!” I shouted, unable to restrain myself. Liz was shepherding Nancy over the mess of branches. I started to move back toward him. He raised the rifle again. As I passed the girls, the crowbar in my hands began to rise into the air. Nancy looked up under the hood; fear in her eyes. Dad squeezed off another round. The zombies all took a step forward. Metal thunked again, but was immediately drowned out.
I squinted first, at the flash of light, then the explosion’s shock-wave hit us. I crouched instinctively, dropping the crowbar and covering my head. A dark outline of the truck crashed back down the ground, all of the zombies turned toward it and started moving in. My dad slipped the gun behind his backpack and moved toward me.
Zombies in the distance walked toward the burning hulk—silhouetted completely black, until they disappeared into the fire.
“Good idea,” I said as he passed me.
“We should get going,” he said.
I moved up ahead of the girls and kept the crowbar ready at my side, Dad took up the rear. There weren’t any zombies ahead of us that I could see—but it was so dark. Even so, in a hushed voice a drew everyone to stop every hundred feet or so to listen. In the quiet, with only the sounds of crunching branches and leaves underfoot, I finally got a chance to catch my breath. Our situation had quickly gone from bad to worse. I didn’t know much about the area. I only went outside the city occasionally, and then only on the freeway, out west to the mall or north to some restaurant in the suburbs. If I remembered correctly we were going east, which meant we would run into the lake sooner or later. I didn’t think that sounded like a good idea.
Our cache of things in the trailer and truck-bed would have kept us fed—at least—for a month or more, even if the kids hadn’t…died. I didn’t know what we had then. I’d filled the bag with things from the cupboard: some food. I knew I had a flashlight, but I didn’t want to waste the battery or draw attention. I started to slide the bag off my shoulder to look inside it when I heard a faint moaning.
“Hey,” I hissed stopping. I hoped that it was just the wind. The rushes of adrenaline and lack of sleep had started making me loopy. It could’ve been the wind; it could’ve been nothing at all.
I didn’t hear anything. A void appeared in my chest before I realized that I was hearing a sound, too close. It took me another half beat to realize that it was just the bag sliding down my arm. I breathed deeply, blinking in the darkness as my heart rate exploded. My hands were shaking as I turned around.
“Close ranks,” I said, waving everyone in. “We’ve got to keep moving, but I’m not doing so good.”
“I’ll take point,” my dad said. “Switch me the crowbar.”
“That’s not what I mean Dad,” I said. I turned back around and kept moving.
“Will you two stop talking like that,” Elizabeth said.
I took a deep breath and let it out through my mouth. My heart rate was slowing back down, but I felt tired. “I’m feeling a little sloppy. What did you guys bring?”
“I don’t have anything,” Nancy pouted.
“Alright,” Liz said, “all right.”
I handed my bag to Nancy. “It’s okay Nanc’,” I said, and kissed her on the cheek quickly. “Look through this one.” She took it from me and started to rustle around inside.
“Don’t have anything like that,” Dad said. “I just grabbed cans.”
“That’s okay Dad,” I said, “It was probably the best idea.”
“I just brought cans too,” said Liz.
There was a huge tree downed in front of us and to one side. The sun was starting to rise above horizontal. The light filtered in through the leaves, which had already started to change. The tree’s massive trunk was at least five feet wide. The distanced flattened it out so that it looked like a glowing wall.
“There’s a jackknife in here, a sponge,” Nancy said. “Some instant coffee.”
“That’ll work,” I said.
I opened the can, stripped off the silver film, and poured some into my mouth. It tasted mostly like tar and my tongue started to sting, but immediately I felt my eyes open wider. My mouth dried out, and I took another mouthful before getting sick. I closed it and handed the bottle back to Nancy who put it in the bag.
The sun rose higher and higher. In the light more zombies became visible off in the distance. Once, on our right in a clearing a hundred feet off, we saw five. They were all hunched over tearing at something that must have been a carcass. Mostly they seemed content to leave us alone. Just before noon the started to appear more often. Four or five times, I had to run ahead of the others and beat one frantically for a few minutes until it stopped moving. It seemed that Dad had finally grasped that the gun would draw their attention. He had actually been really helpful lately. He was a terrible man, who had done things in the past that were unforgivable. I hadn’t even thought about him for years, when I realized his guns when we first heard of the outbreak. But now—he’d been very useful. He was showing real concern. If nothing else, I was comforted by the fact that if something happened to me, there’d be someone to help Nancy—and Liz.
We found a decent place to stop and eat something. Nancy turned me away from the others, and told me that she was worried about me, and kissed me on the cheek. “I can help,” she said. I just looked at her. “No, really,” she said.
We ate quickly, and kept moving. When we reached a small rise with three of them on top, Nancy looked at me intently.
“You should take the bat.” I said gesturing to Liz. Nancy moved toward her and I looked to my father, whose face had no expression. We climbed the rise together, and Nancy took the first swing. I swept the legs out from under the other two and came down hard on their faces lengthwise before the could struggle up. Nancy was pummeling the other one in the stomach. I went up to them and repeated the face smashing blow.
“They go down if you get their heads hard enough,” I said.
She started whipping the bat to clear it of stuff.
I looked over the ridge and there was a giant modern house, all glass windows and straight lines—on stilts. There were some twenty zombies around it, walking around the pylons, or up the stairs on the side. The inside of the house was dark. I noticed that there wasn’t a car beneath it. There wasn’t a driveway—no roads anywhere.
—Introduction and Dramatis Personæ
