Authors: Juliette Harper
Tags: #apocalyptic, #story, #short, #read, #Survival, #zombie, #novella
Obviously relieved to have an assignment, the students broke off in pairs. Quentin took out his keys again and opened his office door. Before he flipped on the desk light, he moved to the windows and drew the curtains. The room seemed comfortingly warm to Vick, who sank into a leather wingback chair in front of the desk, all the strength instantly gone from her body. Quentin sat down in his desk chair, and they simply looked at one another over the gleaming expanse of dark, polished wood.
“Do you drink Scotch, Victoria?” the little man asked suddenly.
“Excuse me?”
“I asked if you drink Scotch.”
Vick nodded numbly.
Quentin got up and walked to a small cabinet under the window. He returned to the desk with a bottle of Glenlivet XXV and two glasses. “I’ve been saving this,” he said. “It’s obscenely expensive and I think very much in order.”
When Vick didn’t answer, he went on. “At the time I bought it, on special order, for a princely $350 a bottle, I wondered what occasion might be worthy of such extravagance. I would say the dead rising to walk among us qualifies.”
Seeing Vick’s stricken expression, he softened his tone. “I am sorry, my dear, but I do not think we have the luxury of delicacy. Their numbers are growing and we must begin to formulate a plan for leaving the city. I am not insensitive to what you have endured this night, but I need for you to be your father’s daughter.”
Vick took the glass he held out, and when he encouraged her with a gesture of his hand, she sipped the whisky. It was strong and smooth, spreading out into her bloodstream with instant authority. She felt a flush of heat move into her cheeks and some stirring of life in her dulled mind. Quentin saw it, too.
“Yes, there you are,” he said gently, taking the chair beside her. “You are Matthew’s daughter, after all, and Hanson’s granddaughter. You are made of quite stern stuff, Victoria. You must draw on that now. Take another drink.”
Vick did as she was told.
“Now, are you listening to me?”
She nodded.
“Answer with your voice, please, Victoria.”
She had to try twice, but finally she said, “I’m listening, Quentin.”
“Where are your grandfather’s notebooks?” he asked, leaning forward with his arms on his knees. “The red leather ones with the black corners. Where are they?”
Vick blinked in confusion. “Papa’s notebooks?”
“Yes, your Papa’s notebooks. Think, Victoria. Where are they? Do you know?”
An image of a cardboard box shoved into the corner of an attic behind a dressmaker’s dummy flitted through her fractured thoughts. “Maine,” she said, sounding as perplexed as she felt. “In the attic, I think. Why?”
“Is anyone at the house in Maine?” he asked.
“No.”
“Excellent,” he said. “Then tomorrow we find a safe means of egress from the city and head north.”
But Quentin never made it to Maine.
January 2015: The Cabin
Vick set the pencil aside and rubbed her tired eyes. Through the open door of the bedroom she could see Abbott, quietly adding wood to the fire. She threw the covers back and cautiously sat up. Her head reeled a little, and she was sore, but she thought she could stand.
Before she could try, however, Lucy said, “What do you think you’re doing?”
Vick didn’t have to turn to see her friend. Lucy was already standing in front of her. “You’re supposed to be asleep,” Vick said.
“You’re supposed to be in bed,” Lucy countered.
“I can’t sleep,” Vick said. “And Abbott just put more wood on the fire. Let me go sit in there for awhile.”
“Wait right there,” Lucy commanded. “And I mean wait.”
When Lucy came back, she had Abbott in tow. His whiskers barely hid the bemused grin. “You are giving Lucy what my grandmother used to call conniption fits.”
“She has those quite a lot,” Vick deadpanned.
Lucy scowled. “I have my reasons.”
Abbott gently moved her out of the way to stand beside Vick. “Lean on me,” he said kindly.
Vick cautiously slid off the edge of the bed, wobbling a little as her legs took her full weight. Abbott’s steadying arm went around her waist, and she was grateful for it. With his support, she gained her balance. “I’m fine,” she said. “Let’s do this.”
They slowly made their way across the short distance, with Lucy hovering in the background. By the time they reached the chair nearest the fire, Vick’s face was white from the exertion. She sank gratefully into the chair and Lucy immediately covered her with a blanket.
“Let me make us some tea,” Abbott said quietly, disappearing into the kitchen.
“You want to tell me what made you decide to go hiking in the middle of the night?” Lucy asked, sitting down on the hearth. “You were writing in your journal when I fell asleep.”
“I did a little bit too much remembering for one night,” Vick said.
“Julie?” Lucy asked.
Vick nodded. “Yes. And I was thinking about those first days when the newspeople tried to tell us it was just a fever.”
Lucy shook her head. “They told us to wear masks and stay inside. Not one of them had the guts to tell us we were in the middle of a plague that was turning the whole population into a herd of rabid dogs.”
Abbott joined them. “The water is on to boil,” he said. “What do you mean rabid dogs?”
“This whole thing started with some kind of plague, a virus or something, but now the dead can infect the living with a bite or a scratch. We’ve seen people who were attacked and torn in two wake up and try to find a way to feed.”
“Dear Lord,” he said. “How do you kill them completely?”
“With a head shot,” Vick said. “Or really any massive damage to the cranium. Whatever switch it is that turns them back on is buried deep inside the head. Blood loss won’t do it. Tissue damage doesn’t phase them. They keep right on walking with broken bones. Nothing works but destroying the brain.”
“I imagine these are things you’ve learned the hard way,” Abbott said.
Vick looked into the fire, her features strained in the wavering light. “We had no idea back then just how many lessons we would have to learn.”
Chapter Nine
Boston, 2012
The need for replacement solar panels forced them to make the drive to Boston. It was a beautiful spring day and they decided to cut through the wild tangle that had once been the botanic gardens. Out of nowhere, one of the dead made a grab for Vick. She dodged deftly and Lucy raised her gun to fire, but Vick hissed, “No. The shot will echo and attract more of them. Come on.”
They sprinted ahead of their shambling pursuer, hopping over a little stream. Vick glanced back, then slowed and put her hand on Lucy’s arm, pointing behind them. As they watched, the dead man stumbled to a stop and stood staring down at the moving water, which was no more than two feet across and probably less than a foot deep.
He could have easily stepped over or waded through, but instead he was making nervous mewling sounds and swaying uncertainly. After a minute or two, he backed away and wandered off as if he’d forgotten about them entirely.
“What the hell?” Lucy whispered.
“I think it was the water,” Vick answered.
To test the theory, they intentionally attracted another of the creatures, and the same thing happened again, and then again. Like everything else they learned about the dead, the two women used their new knowledge to their advantage.
Although the project occupied several weeks and involved multiple abortive versions of the final product, they ultimately figured out how to use a pump rigged to a generator to draw water from the deep spots at the base of the cliff behind the house in Maine.
They directed the water and sent it down a makeshift ditch on the west side of the main building. The pump was too loud to run all the time, but if the dead ever started showing up in numbers, they could turn it on and create an extra barrier.
Often Vick thought they just made work for themselves to stay occupied, but as the basement gradually filled with supplies and equipment, her sense of safety grew. Two could carry more than one, and on what they called “shopping” excursions, they watched each other’s back. Slowly the house did become the
I Am Legend
set, which was their standard joke. There was no lab in the basement and they weren’t looking for a cure, but they were companionable, and Lucy proved to be amazingly adept with machinery.
They could make more noise in the basement, and they often found themselves there at night, Vick cleaning the guns or taking inventory, while Lucy sprawled out on an old discarded sofa. And then there were the times when Vick crept down the stairs alone. Those were the nights when she woke up drenched in sweat, her heart pounding. It wasn’t just that she remembered the shootings on that first night of the end of the world — her world — it was much more that she remembered that slow-motion
click
that preceded the fourth gunshot by just an instant.
She remembered the way she’d slid down to the floor with her back against the wall and watched the sticky redness stain blond curls lying on an expensive Persian rug. The blasts from the window lit the room with random, lurid flashes. They danced in the blood, making it course with life, even as it died there in the deep pile.
When those moments came over her, Vick would cast her eyes down and find something to do with her hands to hide the fine tremor that passed through her elegant, capable fingers. The last thing she wanted was for Lucy to see her hands shake.
Vick often asked herself why she did all this. Why she kept going when everything and everyone she loved before was gone, destroyed by her own hand.
Was living a habit? Or was it more than that? Some sacred imperative she held onto after a life of intellectualizing? The books had served her well. Lucy imagined Vick had prepared for all of this with some kind of Ninja-esque past. In truth? The first dead person she ever killed she put down with a music stand in sheer terrified desperation to find any kind of weapon and just live.
The second one? He was easy. The third one almost killed her. An improbable savior came to her rescue. She let the fourth one kill him. Since then? She hadn’t let one escape. What she knew about survival, about running their home, acquiring the things they needed, preparing for shortages and the cold months? Much of what Lucy perceived as Vick’s capability came from the pages of books and articles, even from YouTube before the Internet died.
In those eleven silent months before Lucy, Vick did anything she could think of to pass the time — worked on the house, researched, even worked out. She’d wrestled exercise equipment up the front walk. A stationary bike, a treadmill that, thank God, folded up and rolled on casters set into the base. She put them by the bay windows in the room she used as her study. Some days, when the voices of the past screamed in her head, she’d ride or walk — or run — for miles and miles and miles, her iPod pumping music into her ears.
Music. Sometimes the music hurt her most of all, but to not have it in her life in some way would have been another form of death.
But for all her evasions, Vick never reached the place where the past left her alone. It haunted her every waking and sleeping moment. She’d just become phenomenally adept at ignoring it — until the moments came when she couldn’t.
When the discordant notes swelled to a crescendo in her head and skittered screeching into cacophony, she fled as far as the confines of her life would let her go. On those nights, she descended into the farthest, blackest corner of the basement. There, alone, curled in a ball, she held herself until she could clamp it all down again.
As for a larger “plan?” She simply intended to go on doing what she was doing until she didn’t anymore. She didn’t, however, intend to ever come back as one of them. She carried a small personal explosive device at all times. A rather clever little thing encased in an Altoid tin. Lucy had one, too. She called them their DIY Unibomber kits. Snap off the locking clip. Wait 15 seconds. And take the bastards killing you straight to hell on your way out the door.
And if there was something . . . else . . . after that, so be it. But this life was what she had to work with right here, right now. At the lowest moment of it all, some benevolence left in the Universe sent her a friend. So, in part, Vick realized she now went on living for Lucy as much as for herself. The only “next” either one of them worried about was the coming moment.
Or at least they had until that day in the bank.
For several weeks, they’d both been troubled by the vague sense that something was coming. For the most part, they’d managed to minimize the role of the dead in their lives to the status of “nuisance,” because they took no risks and were always aware. Complacency was the real monster that lurked in Vick’s mind, the one she fought in herself and wouldn’t allow in Lucy.
So that day in the bank, she put down the shuffling man in the once pin-striped suit the way she would have any of them. She’d long since outfitted her automatic with a silencer. But in a completely silent world, the gun still made too much noise. When she knew she was going to be forced to shoot the man, she was already planning their rapid exit from the area. The bullet she put between his eyes was delivered on auto pilot.