Authors: Jeremy Laszlo
We make our way around the edge of the courtyard, passing the rows of kennels and avoiding looking at them. I realize that there are no bones anywhere and I find that strange. Wherever the zombies have been, the bones are usually left as evidence of their horrid actions. I get this sinking feeling inside of me and I can’t help but sense that there’s something off about this place. No matter how abandoned and empty it seems, I feel like we’re missing something, which is impossible. We’ve combed over every room that we’ve passed, so unless they're hiding in the ceiling, then there’s nothing that we’ve missed. I look at the far end of the structure, opposite the door that we came out of and I stop, feeling Lexi almost bump into me as I stare at the far side of the courtyard, our destination.
While the front of the building has been in pretty good shape, it’s the rear portion of the structure that is damaged. I look at the door flung wide open at an odd angle because it hangs on only a single hinge. The glass is cracked and I look at the door and feel like this is a bad omen. We should turn around and we should get out of here, but I know that this door is leading exactly to where we need to go.
Why am I so stupid
? I ask myself that over and over as I take another step toward the dark room, feeling my feet moving forward regardless of how I feel looking at the obviously terrible decision.
Stop, turn around and get the heck out of there
. That’s what a sane person does in this situation. They don’t go walking deeper and deeper into the room.
I stand in front of the doorway, blocking the light that’s flooding into the room and step to the side, trying to let as much of the pale light in as is possible. It’s a losing battle and as I step over the threshold, I hear the tinkling of metal on the floor and look down to see surgical instruments strewn all about. From what I can see, however, there’s nothing there that I need. My wants are singular and specific.
Across the room, I can see a door and know that it’s the exact room that I’m looking for. I take a step into the darkness, wishing that there were another source of light. We could find plenty of things in this room that we will eventually need. We could stockpile a pretty formidable infirmary with the supplies we could loot from this clinic. I wish we had more time, more bags, and I wasn’t suffering from a massive puncture wound in my guts. I think we might have been able to make something of Jason’s house, if it is actually Jason’s house.
“Back there,” I tell Lexi, who is peering into the darkness with no clue what we’re looking for. She looks toward the direction of the door.
“What is it?” she asks me.
“What we’re looking for,” I tell her.
Chapter Fourteen
I can see that Lexi doesn’t trust this place and I can’t say that I blame her too much. It’s entirely creepy back here and I don’t want to be here anymore than she does, but we have to do what we came here for. If I could just be honest with Lexi and not have her freak out or react poorly to it, I might be able to express and convey the seriousness and the desperation of the situation that we’re in right now. But I know that the moment I confess to her that I’m going to be dead in maybe a few days, everything is going to start falling apart. So I have to work with my deception and drag her along arguing and complaining, but I know the truth and that’s all that matters. This little errand, if it proves worthy of our time, will save Greg’s life and give Lexi a fighting chance.
I reach out for the door handle and give it a twist, expecting it to be locked. As I twist the handle, I feel that there’s absolutely no resistance and feel like maybe our luck is turning around. Maybe we’re not as screwed or hopeless as I originally thought we would be. Opening the door in the darkness, I’m so happy that there’s not a creaking loud, haunting sound that would be perfectly placed in a horror movie. Instead, all there is filling the air is more silence as the door swings open. I look into the suffocating darkness on the other side of the door and feel my heart beating faster. I tell myself to calm down, taking deep breaths to try and get control of myself as my heart feels like it is trying to escape my ribcage. It’s all around me, an inky dark that doesn’t swirl, doesn’t churn, and doesn’t acknowledge my presence. It simply is, like still, calm waters at the edge of the earth.
No, keep it together. I take another step forward.
“Fuck, it’s dark in here,” Lexi grumbles and I can hear her rummaging through her pack. I don’t know what she’s looking for, but I can hear her mutter under her breath, “got so much damn shit in here.” I can’t help but smile at that. I’m going to miss my sister. I stand in the darkness listening to her and I realize how much I actually do love my sister; for all of her annoying traits, she is quite entertaining.
Standing in the darkness, I can’t help but wonder what death is going to be like. In the darkness, I wonder if it is going to be a black oblivion, nothing waiting after the end like all of the atheists believe. Is it going to simply be a termination? Matter and energy never ceases to exist, it just changes form, so I can’t buy into that. If the atoms that make up our bodies and the energy coursing through our nervous system will find new forms, find new purposes, why shouldn’t the soul? I don’t know what’s waiting for me after death, but I pray that it’s actually something better. I don’t want limbo or swirling mists. I want there to be an actual, physical reality waiting for me. I want to be with those I know, those I love. I don’t want death to be an absence or an emptiness. I want there to be something more out there for me and I want Greg and Lexi to be there with me, at least eventually.
Right now, at the end of the world, justice and eternal consequences seem like nothing to me. It seems like vanity and petty revenge to think that the evil go to a bad place to perish and the good to a celestial kingdom full of joy and plenty. I don’t care about that anymore. Death is an equalizer. We all die, the rich and the poor, the good and the evil. Everyone dies in the end and I don’t think it matters what the deeds of the living have to say about the reality of the dead. I just want there to be something more. I want there to be something more than darkness. Slipping away into nothingness seems like the worst possible fate. To simply cease is a tragic thing.
With a click, a cone of light pierces the darkness, like a ray sent from heaven shooting out of Lexi’s hand. I watch the light illuminate the room, brighter than I would have expected from just a flashlight. Clearly she’s using an LED and I look at the light violet, blue light that is slicing through the room. The cone of light darts across the far wall, slashing through the darkness as Lexi’s slightest movements are amplified with the extension of light. As the light moves, I intently stare, looking for anything that might stick out to me. At the slightest glimpse of everything, catching a flash before the light moves on, I can feel the instinctual smile spreading across my lips as I look at the far walls of the room.
“Stop shining it everywhere,” I snap at Lexi as she zips up her bag and slips it over her shoulder. The light drops to the floor and I can feel her gaze shooting through the darkness at me. I turn and look at the dark splotch against the gloomy frame of the door and try to make out what she’s doing, but all I can tell is that she’s glaring at me.
“You’re the one who gave me all this shit to lug around,” Lexi fires back at me, like I’m making her carry around packs of baseball cards or something. I shake my head at her, wishing that she would try to keep in mind that everything we’re doing is to save Greg’s life, and for all she knows, my life. I’d like to think that Greg and my life would be worth a little cooperation and patience, but God forbid. How dare we inconvenience Lexi? As she shines her light up on the wall, I feel the sense of relief as everything I was hoping for remains sitting on the shelves and in a glass cabinet that should be locked, but turns out to be completely open and waiting for us, inviting us to come loot all the contents inside. I grin like a child at Christmas. There’s enough here to help Greg and maybe buy me a little more time to stick around with them, stave off the infection for a while longer to help them see if they can’t decipher this Jason guy’s madness.
“So, does it look like you can work with this stuff?” Lexi asks me through the darkness as I walk toward her guiding light. I look at the cabinet, making her light shift so that it helps me.
“Come closer,” I tell her. I’m starting to wish that we had a larger bag. I reach up and start checking the vials and bottles that are sitting inside of the cabinet, reading each of the labels carefully, checking to make sure we can use anything. I try to run through every possible scenario where we might use each medication I discover. Grabbing the first few bottles that I see as useful, I set them on the counter, separating them from the others.
“Well?” Lexi prods me for some reason. I’m not sure why she’s so interested in this. It’s not like this is something that I need to walk her through, she just needs to hold the light and keep the bag open for me and I can just tell her when we’re ready to get out of here. I feel overly frustrated with her. Not just today, but for a while now. Ever since I watched Noah sacrifice his life to help us get out that farmhouse. I watched those monsters tear him apart to save his son while Lexi ran for the truck. While she was thinking about saving her own skin, Charlie’s father was sacrificing himself so that his son could see the next sunrise. As Noah handed my nephew to me, I knew deep down inside that I was pissed at Lexi on a molecular level. I wanted to have answers for what she did and the amount of time that has passed has done nothing to fight off my disgust toward her. I feel like my anger has festered and spread, just like the wound in my stomach.
“It’s all here,” I tell her calmly, trying to keep under control of my emotions. I don’t want my blood pressure skyrocketing. “We’ve got enough here to help Greg and then some.”
“And you?” Lexi catches me and I try to recover from it.
“Yeah,” I say dismissively.
The silence between the two of us is almost tangible as I work, quickly grabbing a large container of antibiotic pills that will be perfect for us. We need them more than anything and there’s enough here to fight a small outbreak of the Plague. I check the dosage and decide that by breaking the horse-sized pills into quarters, two of these a day would work well enough to keep Greg’s infection in check and help him completely recover from it. He stands a good chance of keeping his leg. Now it’s just a matter of getting these back to him.
Handing Lexi a package of syringes, I can feel my stomach churning, and I can’t help but wonder if it is my guilt, and not my injury that bothers me so much. Taking in each breath feels like I’m inhaling mustard gas, and I need to vent.
“I need to ask you something,” I say finally, deciding that it’s going to be one of the few times in my last days that I’ll have the opportunity to get answers to things I may never know the truth about. I look at Lexi, her face a pale blue ghost in the light reflecting off the counter at me. Her eyes shift, meeting mine, as if she’s been waiting for this confrontation for a while. I decide that it’s probably good. She’s ready for it.
“What?” she asks.
“Nine months is a long time to keep a secret.” I decide to come at her from the pregnancy angle. It’ll work best this way. She doesn’t need to be struck with the heavy questions just yet. “Only you and Noah knew about it?”
“He didn’t know the whole nine months,” she says to me coldly. I suppose that makes sense. If they were sleeping together, he’d catch on to it eventually. I look at the cabinet, continuing my work. So Noah would have known around the second trimester, if he had been lucky. Since she didn’t tell him off the bat, then I wonder when she finally did confess to him that she was pregnant. I feel worse and worse for him with each passing day.
“You didn’t tell me because you thought I’d get angry?” I ask her, trying to clarify.
“That’s what I said,” she says, not so carefully revealing to me that she probably didn’t mean it. It’s something about her tone. She’s so defensive right now that it’s like talking to a wall. I want to slap her and tell her to just come clean about all of it.
“Lexi, the world is ending,” I tell her, shaking my head and putting another vial in the pack. “Why would you be worried about me being angry?”
“I don’t know,” Lexi says half-heartedly, not defeated, but more defiant. “What does it matter?”
“Take a moment and see if you can figure that one out on your own,” I say to her before getting another package of syringes. I clear out what I need from the rest of the cabinet before I feel like I need to drop the axe down on her. I stop after handing her the last of the vials, struggling to get up from the crouch I’ve sunken down into. I look at her as she’s putting the vials into the pack. “Before the end there, you were treating Noah like crap. I can’t say that I ever thought a whole lot about Noah, but in the end, with half of his face missing, he sacrificed himself to rescue my nephew—your son—from a horde of crazed monsters. Now, I know that one good deed doesn’t necessarily wipe away the whole slew of disappointing, lazy deeds, but give the man some credit. That’s one hell of a good deed, probably the best deed you can do. And don’t get me wrong, I love our father, but why the hell is my nephew’s name Charlie and not Noah?”
The pause between the two of us could stretch for miles and as I look at her, I can’t help but feel like I’m on a different planet shouting at her and hoping she can hear me. The vanity of all of it is nauseating. It’s futile to try and communicate with her, I don’t know what I was thinking. I might as well write on a rock and chuck it at her head
“It sounds like you’ve been waiting a long time to use that,” Lexi says cruelly, mercilessly holding back her reasons. I don’t know where this is coming from. Lexi and I used to be best friends. We used to tell each other everything and I know that she cares about me. I know that she isn’t as apathetic as she would like me to think that she is. I know that when that piece of the window frame speared me in the abdomen, she had the look of terror and horror on her face because she thought that she had lost her sister. It was the look that I would have expected from a normal sister, but now her face is cold, distant, and defensive; but I don’t understand why she’s acting this way. Why she’s so bent on keeping me away.
“I have been.” I throw open a cupboard and toss in rolls of gauze wrap, and work my way through the bandages, trying to find everything that we could use in the future. I throw open another door upon the wall and I find thread and needle packets, suture kits. Everything I can find, I take it for us. It’s no use to anyone here, so it might as well be ours. I look over at Lexi, unhappy with the response that I’ve been given. “So that’s it? That’s all you have to say for yourself?” I accuse her, tired of her stupid, petty games.
She looks at me and through the darkness and the pale light reflecting on her face, I can see the fire and the anger etched into her face. “Val, I don’t owe you anything,” she snaps at me angrily. “I can name my child whatever the fuck I want without your almighty approval. Just so you know, the world isn’t revolving around you anymore.”
Anymore?
I find that strange. Lexi, driven into an angry frenzy, slams the pack on the counter hard enough to rattle something further down on the counter. It makes a knocking noise and crashes to the floor with a loud bang that puts our hissing argument to shame. The loud crashing and clanging makes me flinch as Lexi shines her light on it. They’re mostly just stainless steel pans for surgical instruments that were stacked poorly. I quickly move over to that section of the counter and start gathering up scalpels and putting them in the bag, but before I can reach for more instruments, I hear something in the darkness that makes my skin crawl.
Another shiver runs down my back, but this one is on the outside of my body, like a cold wind passing down my spine. It’s the deep, guttural growl of something very angry that it’s been disturbed. Slowly, I turn and look at Lexi, checking to see if it’s just my imagination playing tricks on me or if the infection is giving me hallucinations this early on. But when I look at Lexi’s face, I see the same look of terror and surprise on her face that I feel on mine. Slowly I look toward the dark doorway, trying to see if there’s something or someone standing in the softer darkness. I know what the growl was. It wasn’t a man or a zombie. It was a dog.