Authors: Juliette Harper
Tags: #apocalyptic, #story, #short, #read, #Survival, #zombie, #novella
"Can we stay here until the spring?" Vick asked.
He looked surprised. "There was never any question but that you would stay. Did you think you had to ask?"
"You've lived alone by choice for many years, and now there are four extra people in your house."
He smiled. "I like you all," he said simply. "It was the maddening crowd I didn't like. You are perfectly welcome here for as long as you wish to stay. I do, however, have one request."
"What's that?" she asked.
"Will you play chess with me?"
Chapter Seven
Abbott proved to be not only a congenial host, but an inventive one. In the coming days, he transformed his home on their behalf. With tarps to serve as curtains, he created a "room" for Hettie and Beth, claiming the kitchen corner for himself. By virtue of her injury, Vick continued to sleep in the narrow bed, and Lucy occupied a corner of the same room on a makeshift pallet.
The weather was so bitter, only Abbott left the cabin to bring in more firewood or to retrieve supplies from the nearby shed. On days when it wasn't snowing, he hunted, but he was always careful to clean his kills far away from the cabin so Beth wouldn't see. His attitude toward the child grew increasingly grandfatherly. She delighted in his attentions, as did Hettie, to whom Abbott directed a kind of courtly regard that both Lucy and Vick found gentle and endearing.
Although Vick's wound was healing well, she remained weak and exhausted, admitting only to herself that she'd been running on empty for months, maybe years. Her slow recuperation had as much to do with long-term exhaustion as the gunshot itself. Because she dozed at odd hours, she often found herself awake late at night when the others were asleep.
One afternoon, Abbott came into her room with a book in his hand. "I thought you might like to have this," he said, holding out the leather-bound volume. It was handmade, a strap holding the flap in place. When Vick untied it, she found the book was a blank journal. She looked at him questioningly.
"Introspection is my vice," he said, putting a box of pencils on the table by the bed. "When I decided to leave the world, I commissioned a book binder to make these journals for me. I was prepared to live as a hermit, but I was not prepared to be without the ability to write." Seeing the indecision in her eyes, he added, "Please. It isn't the last. I'd like you to have it. You're not sleeping at night. I know, from long experience, that a journal can be a good companion, a confidante, if you will."
That night, Vick found herself staring at a crisp white page surprised at the longing it engendered in her soul. On a whim, she sketched a musical symbol. Fermata. The grand pause. Was that what they were doing? In this place? During this winter? Had they reached the place where a breathe was being taken?
If so, this might be the only chance she ever had to record all that had happened. Perhaps no one would ever read it, but that didn’t lessen her need to grant them all some tenuous chance of being remembered.
Vick turned the page and wrote, “My old life ended the night of July 4, 2010. Eleven months later, I went back to the concert hall, because that's where I wanted
to die . . .
. . .
On that night in July when everything she cared about disappeared, Vick, like the undead creatures around her, had gone on moving.
Someone she respected told her to survive, so she did, abandoning the apartment in the city and returning to her childhood home in Maine. She found a vehicle big enough and strong enough to protect her from those creatures as she traveled north. She packed it with everything she thought she’d need and she started out — only to be stopped by, of all things, a toll booth.
Looking back, she thought how ridiculous it was that she’d been digging in her purse for change when she realized that the woman in the booth was dead. The creature was wearing so much make-up, it took a minute for Vick to realize she was one of “them.” Her name tag said “Thelma,” and someone had locked her in the booth.
Vick started to put Thelma down, and then she stopped. She’d seen enough killing in the last few days to last her for the rest of her life. She couldn’t pull that trigger again. Maybe the next time she came into the city, if Thelma was still there, she’d do it then. Instead, Vick spotted the button she knew would open the toll gate and triggered it with a broom handle while Thelma growled and hissed.
The first evening back at the home she loved so much, Vick walked the smooth sand of the beach and felt the cold spray off the Atlantic. Here it was easy to forget the upside-down world she’d left behind in the city. It would never be easy to forget who she left behind there. Survive, he’d said. So she set about surviving.
The house was already a strong haven from the elements, outfitted with high-security hurricane shutters and wired for alternative energy. It wasn’t hard to evade the dead wandering around York and get the other things she needed. There were already two freezers in the basement, which she proceeded to fill before all the perishables in the stores rotted like the people who used to shop there.
Everything Vick did in those days was tinged with an Escher-like surrealism. A personal highlight for her was the day she dealt with a dead stock clerk in the grocery store. He was shuffling through a littered sea of Jello boxes. She shot
him, and then calmly took some of the mix, which, appropriately, was red. She used to think the awful stuff was fun when she was a little girl. It almost felt like a reward for once again prevailing against one of them.
Vick filled the hours with the assignment she’d been given. Survive. The hours turned into days, and at first the solitude was fine. She was an only child. She liked having her own space. She preferred not having to share, ruefully admitting to herself that the lowest marks she ever earned on a report card were for her failure to “play well with others.”
She delineated time as “before” and “now.” Back in the days of “before,” Vick never sought out noise to fill the background of her life. She had loved silence, until the world fell silent and still. So still, that every movement was a signal of potential threat. The slightest flutter of a leaf could send her heart pounding in her chest. The stress of her growing hyper-vigilance felt at times as if it would crush her.
Vick came to crave the very sounds she had once avoided, but she didn’t dare introduce them into her life now. Noise was no longer a matter of choice. The creatures were drawn to sound.
An iPod and a set of headphones became the only thing standing between her and utter madness. She couldn’t use them when she was out of the house, but at night, when the shutters were down and the perimeter secure, Vick lived in those headphones. Television and radio were a thing of the past, the Internet died after a month, but her iPod lived, all 64 gbs of it.
In fact, it became her most prized possession, to the point that she locked the device and the extra battery pack she kept charged at all times in a fireproof box when she left the house. That tiny technological brick held the last sounds of the world she had known. Music, videos, podcasts, books, and emails.
She hadn’t realized the wifi on the iPod was on that night in July and that it picked up the last messages she would ever receive. When she turned the wireless off, the email lived on in the iPod’s memory. She waited almost 10 months to read one message in particular. One dated from that night. July 4, 2010.
When she did read it and watched the video attached to it, she calmly loaded her 9 mm automatic, got in the car, drove to Boston, and went to Symphony Hall to commit suicide.
They didn’t make it easy, the omnipresent dead. She had to put down a cellist and an oboe player in the lobby. She knew them both. Or had known them when they were alive. They didn’t get the chance to take her out though. That trigger was hers to pull, and there was only one spot in the building where she planned to pull it.
And then she heard the screams and the very clear profanity floating up through the deserted city streets. The voice was a woman’s, and judging from her vocabulary and the terror in her curses, she was very much alive. Vick tried not to move toward the sound. She tried to go ahead with her plan, but she hadn’t succeeded in exorcising the humanity from her soul in those months of isolation.
Even when she thought mankind was extinct, or morphed out of any coherent recognition, Vick remained human. She ran toward the sound and found Lucy, back up against the wall, trying to stand down six of the creatures with a tire iron. Vick took them out one at a time, and then she took Lucy home with her, and everything changed.
Vick had assumed that she would be alone for the rest of her life and she, and only, she would write the definition of “rest.” And then there was Lucy in that alley. Afterwards Vick told herself she went on living because she was responsible for another person. The truth was that she went on living because — for no reason that she could fathom — she wanted to again.
The fact of Lucy’s existence gave her a convenient excuse, and the actuality of the other woman’s presence gave her someone to talk to. Before Vick knew it, they had built a life in the ruins, and she had come to love her improbable friend. After that suicide was out of the question, because it was not a thing she would ever do to Lucy.
Once their life together became an established matter, Vick simply assumed they would continue with it for whatever amount of time they had because there was nothing else to precipitate change. The facts were simple. They were alive, the dead weren’t. In her own way, she gradually came to feel safe. A kind of predictable routine returned to their day-to-day existence, a dangerous predictable routine, but a routine all the same.
Chapter Eight
The cracking of a log in the main room broke Vick’s reverie. Her thoughts had wandered far into the future from that first night. She stared at the page and started to write again . . .
“You survive, my dear.”
With that simple instruction, Quentin ushered her into the elevator. They rode in silence down to the deserted lobby. As they reached the front entrance, the gentle pressure of his hand on her arm made Vick stop automatically.
But whatever the old man intended to say was interrupted by the dinging of the elevator behind them. Vick turned toward the sound, and for a second, her numbed mind couldn’t process what she saw.
Maurice’s dead assistant, Evelyn, staggered out of the elevator. A shredded length of intestine tumbled out of her ripped and stained blouse. The dangling tendril swayed obscenely as she lurched toward them. Her milky eyes glared above her snarling mouth, and she held her hands out like talons, clawing the empty air.
Suddenly Quentin was pressing the weight of the pistol into Vick’s hand. “I’m sorry, but could you please do something about this?” he asked, seemingly nonplussed.
Vick blinked at the gun, and on instinct flicked off the safety. She raised the weapon and shot Evelyn in the chest. The woman slowed, but she didn’t stop.
Vick fired again. This time the bullet blew out the back of the woman’s head, sending a sticky spray of blood across the framed poster announcing the next performance at the Boston Opera House. Wagner’s “Der Götterdämmerung.”
“Thank you,” Quentin said. “Now, we must hurry.”
When they reached the front doors, Quentin whispered, “We are going to my office at the Conservatory. We must move quickly. We are going straight down Huntington. Stay as close to the buildings as possible. I have a key to the door on this side of Jordan Hall. We won’t cross over until we’re all the way there. Do you understand?”
Vick nodded.
“And do not use your gun again unless it’s absolutely necessary,” he said. “We want to attract as little attention as possible.” With that, he slipped through the door, and Vick followed.
They were, by no means, alone on the street, but most of the foot traffic seemed to be surging down Massachusetts Avenue. Later, Vick would remember bumping into a woman whose eyes rolled with terror, but the veneer of civilization hadn’t completely shattered yet. “Pardon me,” fell incongruously from the woman’s tense, white lips before she fled down the street.
When they reached Jordan Hall, Quentin quickly unlocked the side door. Once they were inside, he locked it again, giving it a tug to make certain it was secure. On the way to his office, they encountered a small knot of terrified music students. When they saw Quentin, they all started babbling at once, obviously relieved to see someone in “authority.”
The little man held up his hand for silence. When the babble of voices died, he pointed to one slender Oriental girl. “Tell me,” he said simply.
They were all enrolled in the summer institute. They’d been in their practice rooms, only to come out again to a world gone mad. The dark-haired girl who seemed the unofficial leader of the frightened little group said, “When we saw the panic in the streets and those . . . people . . . I told everyone to stay inside. We locked the front door.”
“Have you checked all the other doors?” Quentin asked, starting to walk again.
“No,” she said, looking embarrassed. “I didn’t think of that.”
“Securing buildings against a mob is hardly in your curriculum, dear,” he said mildly. “Please divide yourself into teams of two. No one goes anywhere alone. Make sure all the doors are locked. Block them if necessary. Find out if we are the only ones in the building, and then report to me in my office.”