Parrish looked back
through the blinds. “What happened to the infected?” she
asked. “Did they leave?”
Noah opened the door
wider and came to stand beside her at the window looking down. His
arm touched hers and butterflies stirred in her stomach. She moved an
inch to the side, not ready for that feeling.
Noah glanced her way,
then put his hand in his pocket. “As soon as the sun came up,
they all headed inside,” he said. “I don’t think
they like the natural light for some reason.”
“How long ago was
that? Have you been up all night?”
He shrugged. “Mostly,”
he said. “When the last one left, I laid down on the couch for
a little while, but I’m not sure I really slept.”
Silence passed between
them. Noah shifted his weight, then pulled his hand from his pocket.
“Listen, I’ve
been wanting to talk to you about the other night,” he said.
“With your mom.”
Parrish swallowed and
turned away, pretending to study something outside. She didn’t
really want to talk about that night.
“I’m really
sorry I didn’t go with you to the hospital,” he said. “I
feel terrible for just letting you drive off alone. I meant to come
talk to you after you got home, but I never got the chance.”
“It’s
fine,” she said, a lump forming in her throat. Tears stung the
corners of her eyes, but she pushed them back. If she started
thinking about all the things worth crying over, she might never
stop. “You were really brave just to come over there with
everything you already knew about the virus. You risked your life to
help me.”
Noah touched her arm
and the spot tingled with the warmth of his touch. Part of her wanted
to pull away, but part of her wanted to lean in to him. To throw her
arms around him.
“I should have
done more,” he said. He cleared his throat and ran his thumb
back and forth across her skin. “Parrish—”
Something crashed
downstairs.
A moment of panic
rushed through her. What if those things had gotten through the
boarded up windows? What if she hadn’t nailed them in tight
enough? She ran, Noah close behind her on the stairs.
When they got
downstairs, they ran through the hall, into the living room and
finally, to the kitchen. They found Karmen standing beside the
island, surrounded by a pile of pots and pans, flour on her face and
pancake batter in her hair.
Parrish wanted to kill
her. “What the heck are you doing down here? You scared us to
death with all that banging.”
Karmen looked up,
pouting. “I’m trying to be sweet and make breakfast,”
she said. “I can’t find the right kind of pan, though.
Noah, what the hell is up with your kitchen? Nothing is where it
should be in here. It’s like every cabinet I open has some new
disaster behind it.”
Noah laughed. “No
Mom, remember? It’s been just me and Dad for a long time. We
don’t really cook.”
“Then why do you
have all this stuff?” Karmen gestured to the pots on the floor.
“Obviously someone cooks.”
“No, not really,”
he said, hopping up to sit on one of the bar stools. “When we
moved here, the house was already furnished. I don’t think
anyone’s opened those cabinets in years.”
“Lucky me.”
Karmen used her right hand to brush her hair from her eyes and left a
giant glob of pancake batter on her forehead. The three of them
looked at one another, then burst out laughing.
*
An hour later, they sat
at the dining room table, remnants of a huge breakfast feast on their
plates.
Parrish stretched, then
reached for her coffee cup. “Gosh, I haven’t eaten like
that in a week,” she said. “I’ve been living off
cheese and crackers at my house.”
“Peanut butter,”
Karmen said. “I’ve eaten two entire jars of peanut butter
all by myself this week.”
Noah laughed and
Parrish studied him from the corner of her eye. Even tired, he was
gorgeous. His dark blond hair curled slightly on top and his brown
eyes were almost golden when he smiled.
“That was so
good, Karmen. Where did you learn to cook like that?” he asked,
throwing his napkin down on top of his leftover chocolate chip
pancakes.
“I have hidden
talents,” Karmen said with a wink. “Believe it or not, my
grandmother taught me to cook years ago before she got sick.”
With the mention of the
word sick, everyone grew quiet. As much as she wanted to pretend that
this was just a happy Saturday morning get-together with friends,
Parrish couldn’t ignore the fact that there were boards over
the windows for a reason.
“What are we
going to do?” She looked both of her companions in the eyes,
hoping at least one of them had some good ideas about what happened
next.
“What do you
mean?” Karmen asked. “We’re staying here until
someone comes to get us.”
Parrish rolled her
eyes.
“No one’s
coming to get us,” she said. “Half the world’s
population is sick or dead from this virus, and now half or more of
those people are trying to eat the few of us who are still alive.
It’s every man for himself out there.”
As the words left her
lips, Parrish immediately thought of her sister in New York City. She
was all alone up there as far as Parrish knew. She didn’t think
there was any way their father had recovered from the sickness. And
what if it was worse? What if he’d turned in to one of those
things that had attacked them last night? How would Zoe survive
something like that?
She needed to get to
her sister. But how? New York would be the worst possible place to be
on the planet right now.
“Don’t be
silly.” Karmen rose from the table and started collecting
plates. “Someone always comes. We just have to wait this out.
Once the government gets this figured out and under control, they’ll
send in the Army or National Guard or whatever.”
Noah grabbed more
plates and followed her in to the kitchen. “It’s not that
simple.”
“There’s
not going to be any more government. No Army. No police.”
Parrish turned on the water in the sink and took a plate from the
stack of dirties. “There’s just going to be people like
us. Random survivors spread all over the country, fighting against
whatever these things are.”
“That can’t
be right,” Karmen said. Her shoulders slumped. “I mean,
how can that be right? There are billions of people out there. They
can’t all be dead.”
Parrish wasn’t
sure if she wanted to hug her or strangle her for being so naive. “At
this point, who really knows what the world looks like? All you have
to do is look outside on this street, though, to get some kind of
idea. How many people do you think are still alive right here in our
little neighborhood? How many people have you seen walking their dogs
or driving to the store?”
Karmen closed her eyes
and put her head in her hands.
“We have to be
realistic,” Noah said, passing a plate Karmen’s way. When
she refused to take it and put it away, he reached over her and
opened the cabinet, putting the plate away himself.
Parrish almost laughed
at the irony of the situation. No parents to tell them to do the
dishes and yet, here they were, cleaning up after themselves.
Voluntarily.
“It’s
possible no one is coming to help us for a very long time,” he
said. “Possibly never. We need to come up with some kind of
plan for how we’re going to survive this thing.”
“How much food do
you have in the house?” Parrish asked. It was the first thing
that came to mind. As long as they had food and water, they could
hide out here for months if that’s what it took.
Noah crossed over to
the pantry and opened it. He frowned. “Not much,” he
said. “I told you we don’t really cook. We get delivery a
lot. There’s a ton of frozen food, though. Here and in the
chest freezer outside. The problem is if we lose power, we’ll
lose all of that.”
“Lose power?”
Karmen screeched. She stomped her foot like a child who wasn’t
getting her way. “Don’t you think you guys are both
overreacting just a little bit?”
“No,”
Parrish said. Karmen was getting on her last nerve. “Don’t
you remember what we went through last night? Can you seriously not
see what’s going on in the world? If we’re going to
survive, we have to be smart and think ahead.”
“Well, I think
the smartest thing to do is turn on the TV or the radio and see what
the news is saying,” she said. “Surely someone out there
has a plan they want us to follow. The best place to tell us about it
would be on TV or the internet or somewhere public. I think we should
check there before we start making grand predictions about losing
power and living off the land or whatever.”
Parrish, to her own
surprise, actually thought this was a good idea. Not that she wanted
to give Karmen the satisfaction of thinking she’d been right
about something. “Maybe turning on the TV or the radio isn’t
the worst idea you’ve had.”
Unfortunately, when
they flipped on the big screen in Noah’s living room, every
channel held the same message. A black screen with white text read:
Survivors are
instructed to stay in their homes. Do not open your doors to
strangers. If someone in your household is sick or infected,
quarantine them to a single room in the house and board up the doors.
Parrish stared at the
screen, a feeling of dread rumbling in her stomach. This was the best
advice the government could come up with? Stay inside and board up
the doors. They’d done all that on instinct and they were just
a small group of teenagers. Couldn’t the best minds in the
country come up with something a little more creative?
They really were all
alone.
Three days later,
Karmen stood in the middle of the large walk-in closet. She shook her
head in disappointment. There was absolutely nothing wearable in
there.
She reached for the
closest rack and started pulling shirts down the rod one at a time.
Noah’s dad had
nothing but brown suits in here. The same brown suit in variation,
over and over again. She didn’t see a single t-shirt or casual
polo. Nothing. There was a stack of plain white undershirts in one of
the middle cubbies, but when she pulled it out and held it over her
body, she shook her head. She looked inside at the tag. XL. Great. It
might as well have been a tent.
She opened the drawers
looking for boxers, but those were way too big too. They just slid
right down and she wasn’t about to wear a fifty year old man’s
boxers with a belt. Yuck.
She thought about
asking Noah for clothes. Most guys thought it was sexy when a girl
wore their clothes. But both Noah and Parrish had been keeping to
themselves the past few days. No one was really talking to each
other.
She needed her own
clothes, and that was that.
She’d been
wearing the same white tank top and pink shorts for the past four
days. She’d washed the same pair of underwear four times in the
sink. She was done. She needed fresh clothes. Noah and Parrish had
ganged up on her last time she’d mentioned it, saying it was
too risky for her to go over there. They didn’t care that those
things only came out at night. No, they swore it was too dangerous
because there was no way to know if one of them had wandered into her
house.
But she knew she’d
locked all the doors. There was no way one of those things had gotten
inside. It wasn’t like they had keys or anything.
She’d made her
mind up, and she didn’t care what they had to say about it.
In fact, she wasn’t
even going to tell them she was going. They’d just talk her out
of it or try to scare her. But it was ten in the morning. There
wouldn’t be any infected wandering around this early,
especially when the sun was shining as bright as it was today.
Karmen tiptoed down the
hall and listened in at Parrish’s door. She was in there
playing Mozart again. Her favorite sleeping music. Parrish had been
staying up at night, watching the rotters walk back and forth under
the street lamps. Then she’d sleep half the day away. It was
weird.
But with Parrish
asleep, it was the perfect time to go out.
Noah was downstairs in
the basement. Again. She’d seen him sneak off down there
sometime around eight this morning, which usually meant he wouldn’t
show his face until lunchtime. She had no idea what he was doing down
there all the time, but whatever it was, at least he was out of her
hair for now.
The guy was weirder
than she ever knew. Hot, but weird.
No one would even know
she’d gone. All she had to do was figure out the easiest way in
and out of the house. The front door was too barricaded to ever go
out that way. There had to be at least fifteen boards across the
front. But the back only had five. She could remove those boards and
make her way around the back of the house, through the back gate.
It seemed better than
trying to squeeze through one of the windows.
The garage door was out
because it would make too much noise going up and down. The back door
was her best choice.
She grabbed the hammer
and went to work, being as quiet as she could as she pulled the nails
from the boards.
It took longer than
she’d planned, but as soon as she had all the boards removed,
she unlocked the door and walked out into the back yard. She stood on
the steps for a few seconds, letting the summer breeze warm her skin.
She’d been in that house way too long without any fresh air.
She crossed behind the
house and unlatched the gate, then walked into the side yard. She
instantly felt exposed. As if every rotter in the neighborhood was
now watching her cross the lawn, looking at her juicy skin and
wanting a taste.
She glanced down at the
wound on her leg. It had actually been healing faster than she
expected, but what if they could smell the old blood on her or
something?