Authors: Juliette Harper
Tags: #apocalyptic, #story, #short, #read, #Survival, #zombie, #novella
“Lady,” I said, “you are seriously crazy.”
“Lot of that going around.” She accelerated into the night. I looked over my shoulder at Boston. Even knowing that walking horrors filled the city, I felt sick to my stomach leaving it behind.
We made good time. Every few miles the headlights picked up one or two of the dead on the side of the road. Vick steered around wrecked cars with practiced ease. I gave in to my exhaustion and drifted off, waking only when she pulled the SUV into a garage.
I followed her out into the moonlight, but other than hearing the ocean to my right, I couldn't tell much about where we were. The real shock hit me when we went inside. Vick turned on a light switch. I just stood there staring stupidly at the fixture.
“What’s the matter?” Vick asked.
“I haven’t seen a light on in months,” I answered numbly.
“Come in the kitchen,” she said. “I need something to eat.”
While I watched, she made coffee. Honest to God coffee. It smelled incredible. The machine transfixed me like a caffeinated lava lamp. When Vick put the warm cup in my hand, everything hit me at once. I was sitting at a table. The house was clean. There was electric light. I started babbling about that Will Smith movie,
I Am Legend
. A scene just jumped into my mind. The woman he finds cooks some bacon he’d been saving. He loses his temper and scares the little kid.
My hands began to shake. I stuttered out a rapid fire staccato of incoherent words. Images of Bruce fired across my consciousness, that one sad eye looking up from the pavement. By the time she slipped a blanket around my shoulders, I was well on the road to an hysterical breakdown.
She knelt beside me and said, “Stop it.”
I looked at her fearfully, but she wasn’t angry. Compassion filled her eyes. She repeated, "Stop it.” And added, "Don't give them your power. We’re alive. I plan to stay that way. You want to stay alive with me?”
When I nodded, she smiled and patted my knee. “How do you like your powdered eggs?”
That night the dead chased me down the dim corridors of restless sleep until I awakened sobbing. She was there, soothing me with quiet words, telling me I was safe. Hours earlier, this same gentle woman slaughtered half a dozen monsters in an alley. In the coming weeks I came to appreciate the deep goodness she buried beneath a contained economy of style.
Vick held the ragged world together for us both, hiding what I soon recognized was bone-deep pain.
Somehow she stays human in a world where humanity is in short supply. She's my friend and I love her, but I also respect her. The dead may kill her some day, but they'll never make her a victim.
Chapter Four
January 2015: The Cabin
“Your friend sounds remarkable,” Abbott said, puffing thoughtfully on his pipe.
“She is,” Lucy answered simply.
They sat in silence for a few minutes as Abbott continued to smoke. Finally he said, “That’s quite some story.”
“You don’t believe me?”
“I believe you’ve been through something terrible,” he said turning toward her. “And I believe you’re telling me what you think is the truth.”
“I wouldn’t believe me either,” Lucy said, rubbing her eyes tiredly.
“The point, my dear, is that I don’t disbelieve you.” He tapped out the pipe ashes against the grate and stood. “And we don’t have to sort this out tonight. Or even tomorrow. Your friend is going to need a long time to recover, and no one is going anywhere in this weather. Why don’t you get some rest before you make yourself sick?”
Before she agreed to stay in the main room, Lucy checked on Vick. Hettie sat beside the bed in the same chair Lucy had occupied for the last week. When Lucy raised a questioning eyebrow, Hettie shook her head and mouthed, “You need sleep.” Lucy was too tired to argue.
Abbott brought her a pillow and blankets, apologizing all the while that there was no extra bed. He insisted she settle close to the fire to stay warm. He retreated to a corner of the kitchen near the cook stove. Silence fell over the cabin, and Lucy, cocooned in the covers, stared into the fire until she finally slipped into an exhausted sleep.
As the days passed, the little group in the cabin developed a routine. Hettie and Beth had long ago formed a partnership, and Lucy could never decide if the adult was caring for the child or the other way around. Abbott always had something in his hands. Repairing, cleaning, creating. In the evening, if he could find nothing else to do, he sat in front of the fire and carved stray bits of wood into things both useful and fanciful.
In a way, that described the man himself. He’d lived alone for years in this remote wilderness, but there was none of the eccentric squalor of a hermit that might be expected of such an existence. Well-worn books filled his shelves, sitting beside framed photos of himself as a younger man taken in spots all over the world.
“What did you do before you came here, Abbott?” Lucy asked him one afternoon.
“Precious little a man might care to admit,” he said cryptically.
A few days later, while he was out chopping wood, she stood at the window watching him heft the ax and repeated the words to Vick who lay propped in bed against a mountain of pillows. Her face was drawn and pale, but her eyes were alert and engaged.
“That’s all he said?” she asked.
Lucy turned away from the window. “That’s all.”
“Can you tell anything from the photos?”
“He hunted big game in Africa. He knows how to fly a plane. He rides horses. He reads books like the ones you read.”
“What do you mean?”
“Literature, history, biography. Like in your library at the house in Maine.”
A shadow crossed Vick’s face at the mention of her childhood home, but she dismissed her own sentimentality with a shake of her head. “Do you trust him?” she asked.
“Yes,” Lucy answered. “He could have done anything to us he wanted while you were out of it. He said he wasn’t going to hurt us. And he hasn’t. He carried you here. And the way he took that bullet out of your chest, he has to be a doctor or something.”
Vick shifted against the pillows and winced. Lucy walked to the bed and put her hand on the other woman’s arm. “Are you in pain?”
“Not so much. Sometimes I just move wrong.” Vick saw the look in her eyes. “I’m okay, Lucy. If anything, I’m mad at myself for my own stupidity. After all of this, I manage to shoot myself tripping in the woods.”
“You were exhausted. We’d been moving for days, there was a cold north wind blowing, and you were trying to find us some shelter.”
“And I still nearly killed myself for no other reason than I got my feet tangled up. I survive the apocalypse and die of clumsiness,” she said.
“Naw,” Lucy grinned, “you weren’t going to die.”
“And why is that?” Vick asked.
“Because if you died, you know I’d never let you live it down.”
Vick cracked up at the non sequitur, which was what Lucy intended. They laughed together, and then Vick caught the younger woman’s hand. “I’m sorry I put you through this.”
“You were the one who took the bullet,” Lucy answered, looking down at the floor and swallowing against the lump that rose in her throat.
“Somehow, I think you had the worse part of it,” Vick said softly.
“We gotta find someplace we can dig in and stay,” Lucy said, her voice strained. “We can’t keep running like this. Somebody is gonna die. You. Me. Both of us. We get ourselves killed, what are Beth and Hettie going to do?”
“Have you seen any sign of the dead?”
Lucy shook her head. “I think it’s too cold this winter."
“They’re walking corpses, Lucy. They don’t feel the cold. It's never affected them before.”
“This is the hardest winter we've had since 2010. Unless they have anti-freeze in their veins, they have to at least be slower than usual. Besides, the drifts out there are deep.”
Vick looked thoughtful. “If that's true, we could rest until spring. Do we have any idea what month it is?”
“I asked Abbott a few days ago. It’s January.”
“So we could have three months before they really start moving again.”
“That’s what I think.”
“Will Abbott let us stay here with him?” Vick asked.
“Yes,” Lucy said, “I think he will. Just the way you let me stay with you.”
June 2011: York, Maine, Lucy
Lucy opened her eyes. Sick panic immediately flooded through her. Where was she? What had she missed? Was she safe? What was that sound?
Her gaze settled on something turning on the ceiling. She stared at it for several seconds before she realized it was a fan. The sheet beneath her hand felt smooth and crisp, and she realized she was comfortable.
She sat up and looked out the large window at the foot of the bed. The Atlantic Ocean and a clear sky filled the pane. Framed by the gleaming wooden trim, the scene looked like a serene painting.
A robe was lying across the foot of the bed, and Lucy's feet came down beside a pair of slippers on the scarred, but polished hardwood. Her head dropped into her hands. Silent tears fell through her trembling fingers. Safe. How long had it been since she'd felt this way?
Cautiously she walked into the hall, peering over the stair railing before descending. She stopped halfway down. The windows weren’t boarded up. The ground floor was light and airy, with a view as open as the one upstairs.
“This chick really is nuts,” Lucy thought. A thick board barred the front door. A riot gun sat propped in the umbrella stand. But those open windows really bothered Lucy.
A fluttering caught her attention. Lucy looked out the glass oval and recognized alternating red and white stripes. The morning breeze was catching an American flag bracketed to the house.
Silently she moved around the living room. Pictures of people and sailing boats cluttered the shelves. There were tennis trophies and equestrian blue ribbons. She picked up a silver-framed image and frowned.
“Jack Kennedy was a friend of my father’s,” Vick said, coming out of the kitchen. “That was taken shortly before he was killed in Dallas. Good morning.”
“The windows aren’t boarded up,” Lucy blurted out.
Vick walked to a bank of wall switches and threw one. With a slight hum, an automatic shutter began to lower.
“It’s a security shutter,” Vick explained. “They protect the windows during storms, but they're strong enough to keep the dead out. At night they block all light. There are solar-powered motion detectors in the yard. If anything breaks the beam, an alarm will sound.”
“What happens if the power goes out?”
Vick opened a closet door and brought out a long piece of metal with a crooked end. “All the shutters can be hand-cranked into place. It’s slower, but it works.”
Lucy felt some of the tension drain out of her body. “Sorry,” she said. “It’s just so open here. I’m not used to it.”
“That’s okay,” Vick said. “How did you sleep?”
“Good. Real good.” Her stomach grumbled as if on cue.
Vick laughed. “Come on in the kitchen. I have breakfast ready.”
Lucy couldn’t remember a day in the last year when she hadn’t been hungry. When Vick put a full plate of food in front of her, Lucy's reticence vanished. While she ate steadily, Vick explained their circumstances.
“This is my childhood home,” she said. “The house backs up to a rocky cliff. The dead people can’t negotiate the steep terrain. I built barriers at the back of the house. The sand on that side is deep and thick. It bogs them down. They come up to it, but they can't cross. You can walk out on the beach in front of the house without worrying.”
“How do you have electricity?” Lucy asked, eyeing a jar of jam on the table.
Vick moved the jar closer. “Go ahead. There’s more where that came from.”
While Lucy smeared jam on her toast, Vick said, “I was interested in alternative energy before all this happened. It was really just a hobby. Now it's a lifesaver, literally. There’s a wind turbine out back, and solar panels on the roof. The house can run off grid if you don't use too many things at once. There's a schedule for switching everything off and letting the batteries charge to full.”
“Why the shutters?”
“I worked in Boston," she said. “This place sat empty a great deal of the time. I installed the shutters to protect the property from storms and break-ins. Now, I put them down at night so the dead won't be attracted to the lights. The upstairs stays dark, so there's no need for the windows to be covered. Besides, the stars are pretty up here.”
“And the barriers? All this food?”
Vick laughed. “I’ll show you. I’ve had a lot of time on my hands. I’m the only living person in town. I thought I was the only one in the world until I heard you scream. I have to tell you, I was pretty happy to see you, Lucy.”
Lucy looked at her plate, slowly putting her fork down and hiding her shaking hands in her lap. Vick waited. Finally Lucy looked up, tears rolling down her face. “I can stay here? With you?”
“Would you like to?” Vick asked.