Authors: Jeremy Laszlo
Lexi tumbles onto the porch, rising to her knees before turning and climbing back to her feet as the truck roars to life behind me. I watch as Noah slowly walks through the threshold, making it out of the house. I can see the silhouettes of more of those things. I cannot comprehend how many are even inside the basement or how they got there, but the house is now crawling with them. As Lexi splashes past me, I watch Noah, wondering how he’s even standing or what he’s waiting for. I can’t even imagine the pain and agony that he must be in right now. I stare at him, horrified that he’s the one who is watching over us and protecting us. I watch him as one of those things slams him into the post on the porch. He keeps the rifle between him and the monster, hurling it away and throwing it aside, flinging it out into the mud where the elements keep it in place. The sloppy earth keeps ahold of the monster while Noah swings the butt of his hunting rifle at the next monster coming his way.
I can hear Lexi slamming the truck door shut and it’s like she’s just shattered the world for me. In all the commotion, I was too worried about surviving and saving Noah. I’ll never forgive myself or my sister. What the hell was Lexi doing while I was worried about getting Noah out of the house? The baby is still in there. In the nursery. Her son is her priority and it is apparent that she still has not realized her error. I’m the one standing here, worried about my nephew as I look at the house where nightmares are pouring out of the house. I look at the door, knowing that I have to get back in there. I have to get into the house and save my nephew.
Noah turns and the look in his eyes tells me that he hasn’t forgot his son. He looks at me and I feel a sinking, gut-wrenching sensation as he nods to me. I don’t know what he means, but the look of determination in his eyes speaks volumes. What does he expect me to do? It’s the kind of conspiratorial nod that indicates that something is about to take place, and I’m left here staring with my hands empty. Before I can say anything, Noah charges the front door, and the snarling maws and clutching fingers that await him there.
I watch him vanishing into the sea of silhouettes and snapping teeth. Overhead, thunder ripples across the sky and I try to remember the layout of the ground floor. The monsters leave the entry of the house and I realize that Noah has used himself as bait to draw them away. Pulling my feet free of the slurry that’s churning beneath my soles, I rush around the house, blinded by the pouring rain as I race to the back corner, where I hope he will have left me a clear path to the stairs. I can break the window, get in to my nephew, and smuggle him back out through the front door to the truck. It makes no difference how I get out, just that I do.
Sloshing to the window, I lift back the butt of shotgun, prepared to shatter the glass and face whatever’s coming afterwards. But before the butt of the shotgun can hit the glass, the window slides up and nearly a dozen arms are clawing at the figure inside of the house. I stare in horror as Noah emerges from the sea of arms, my nephew in his bloody hands. I look at him, watching him as the creatures inside bite down on his shoulders, the back of his head, and yet his hands hold out my nephew to me in the pouring rain, unwavering, unflinching. I drop the shotgun and reach up, taking my nephew in my arms and watch Noah as those things wrap their arms around him, dragging him into the darkness of the house. As he’s pulled away from the window, I can see the ruined side of his face, his scorched eye looking directly at me. There’s nothing I can do. I watch him helplessly.
Then he’s gone.
I watch the hole in the wall, feeling my nephew squirming in my hands, whimpering and crying as he adjusts to the pelting rain, growling, and snarling. Blocking him from the pouring rain, I hurry to take him back to the shelter of the truck. I feel the sorrow tearing me up inside. There’s something shattered inside me. It is broken, never to be restored. Lexi’s door is thrown open, waiting for us and I don’t hesitate for a moment. Handing her my nephew, I close the door, looking back to the house where I can’t hear a sound over the boom and roar of the thunder. I rush around the truck, climbing into the back as Greg floors it.
Sitting in the back of the truck, I realize that I’m crying. The tears continue to roll down my cheeks as I sniff and wipe my nose, feeling the mask of muck completely gone from my skin. I look at Lexi, who must be heartbroken right now. I can only imagine what she’s going through. She did love Noah, even if she had conspired to end his life out of pity. It was a tragic end, and I can only imagine what her thoughts must be. The inside of the cab is eerily silent as the truck hobbles down the road.
Noah had sacrificed himself knowingly. I had treated him like shit more often than not, and in the end he was the hero. He was the one to stand up against unbeatable odds and lay his life down for that of an innocent. Lexi had lost a good man. This world sucks.
The miles pass beneath us and I dwell on what lies behind. The silence is my only companion, but it only feeds me dark thoughts to dwell upon. If something doesn’t change in our atmosphere soon, I feel that I may be lost in the darkness of my own mind forever. This is what leads people to go mad.
“I never asked,” I say after a while, breaking the silence as Lexi wipes the rain coming through the void in the front of the truck from her eyes. “What are you naming him?” There’s no answer for a long pause that makes me feel like I could drown in the silence again. “You should name him Noah. Not that it’s any of my business. It just seems like the right thing to do, after his father.”
“No,” Lexi answers coldly as Greg points the truck northwest. “I’m naming him Charlie. Dad was the only man strong enough to survive out here. Noah wasn’t strong enough.”
-End
Book Six
Chapter One
Nothing changes. As the truck struggles along, the world around me is a vast, empty waste full of cemented earth, charred trees, and dust—endless miles of dust upon dust. No matter how much it rains, there’s always dust out there. It’s choking, suffocating and completely imprisoning to look out at so much nothing. There’s nowhere to go, nowhere to hide, and nowhere to put your hope. Tomorrow offers nothing, a million days passing beyond sundown offer you nothing. I look at all the desolation and wonder what the point is anymore. For the first time since this all spiraled out of control, I think that the dead are luckier than the living. At least they get to see something different, no matter what comes after life. At least there’s a change.
The truck hobbles along like a dying horse. We’ve been through a lot with it, but mostly, its final leg is met with silence and indifference. I would be worried about the truck, worried that we’ll have to get out and walk, but not anymore. For me, the world is a dark, terrifying place that’s full of death. You can’t look anywhere now and see something that isn’t dead. It used to be that you could walk out of your house or go to a park or go on a hike and you’d see life flourishing. But those days are gone. I’m left in abandonment, destruction, and dereliction of an entire planet. I sigh as I look out the window of the truck, wondering how much longer before it dies.
It feels like forever, driving across the wasteland that is no longer recognizable. Everything has shifted, slithered, and washed away. Towns are flooded with mud, slowly being scrubbed clean from the surface of the earth. Whatever fire hasn’t ravaged, water and earth are now taking their turns pummeling into submission. Humanity is gone and the Earth doesn’t give a damn anymore. It’s a primordial world of water and earth. The Earth has flipped a colossal middle finger to Mother Nature and the Human Race. This is the celestial orb. This is the rock whirling through space and we’re all just parasites clinging to the surface for a few moments longer.
The darkness moving across the surface of the earth slowly begins to fade as the sun climbs over the horizon, struggling as it goes, feeling its vanity as it shines across a barren Earth. I notice that the only kind of change that’s coming for us today is that there are buildings on the horizon. The sun hits them, casting long shadows to the west, but we only see the reflection of the light on their pale, bare surfaces, the windows sparkling and reflecting the sun’s light. I look at the sight of the place and feel nothing. It’s just the endless squares on the horizon that I’ve come to recognize as a city. Towns don’t stretch across a horizon and the roads are large enough that I can actually recognize them now. You don’t just have to follow the power lines as you go. I wonder for a moment what the city used to be called. I doubt there’s anyone there who hasn’t gone completely insane, murdering and killing everything that they run across. There are no more good people. There are no more normal people. The spectrum of good and evil has shifted, tilted and the middle marker of normal has slid into the darkness of evil. I don’t know why survival demands cruelty, but it does.
We know that better than most.
I look at Greg as he drives the bouncing, injured truck with difficulty, swearing as the wheels pull to one side or the other, depending on the shifting earth they’re traversing. The ground is still moist, having just endured another storm that caused flooding in the area, carving enormous ruts through the ground where the water slithered and snaked its way to freedom. Soon the entire earth will slither down the channels of rivers and streams until all the soil slips beneath the surfaces of the oceans. All that will be left is rock and the frigid air. I look up where fat clouds drift like zeppelins across the sky. They’re swollen gray blobs, blocking the stars from twinkling freely across a dark field of oblivion. I feel like the entire country just suffered an enormous storm.
We’ve been driving for days and the earth is still soggy, mushy, and difficult to traverse. Twice we’ve been stuck and we had to get out and push, no easy task. Greg has remained our vigilant driver through the entire journey. I can’t drive. I don’t have the focus. I don’t care anymore. Every time I try to care about something, it dies. It doesn’t just die, it bursts into flames, plummeting from the lofty skies of idealism before splattering in blazing glory across the murky surface of reality. Amidst the carnage and the chaos of the wreckage, I’ve decided that I’m done with hoping. I’m done with caring. Everything is dead. Everything is gone. Everything is
not
going to be okay.
I don’t even have to look at the map, I know what that cluster of buildings is supposed to be. I’ve stared at it enough that I’ve memorized all the stops we were supposed to hit on the way to our destination. One by one, we’ve silently been crossing off the items on the list. One desolate ruin after another and here we are. I look at the buildings on the horizon, my head leaning against the window, feeling the cold air whipping across my face. The missing windshield gives me the perfect, unhindered view of Dayton, Ohio. I don’t think I’ve ever intentionally been in Dayton, and if I have been, I certainly can’t recall a thing about it. I’ve taken a lot of road trips, but Dayton was never a hot spot to hit. I look at the wall of buildings waiting for us and I understand why. Everything here looks about as desolate as all the other towns and cities that we’ve seen.
I can’t stand the sight of it. I look to my left where Lexi is sleeping with her head leaning against her window too. She’s been sleeping a lot lately thanks to her circumstances. I don’t blame her. In fact, I’m happy to see that she’s resting. Giving birth is a trauma that the body suffers and endures for the sake of reproduction. You’re not supposed to be up and running and fleeing for your life the moment you’ve given birth. The body needs to rebuild, to survive. I look at Lexi and I’m grateful that she’s giving herself the chance to survive this. In her arms rests little Charlie, only a few days old and having witnessed and endured more horror and terror than most people ever had to experience. I look at him and I wonder how he’s going to survive in this world where nightmares are tangible, real things hunting for you in the darkness. I look at him, curled up so that only his face is visible, pale and perfect. He’s hardly alive in this world and he’s completely at peace and surrounded by persistent danger.
“You should let me drive,” I say just loud enough so Greg knows that I’m talking to him.
“I’m good,” Greg answers, wincing with pain as he continues to try and pull his weight with the four of us. After a single quip about Charlie being the strongest one among us, Greg took everything to heart and has been pushing himself harder than he ever should have. His body is fighting as hard as it can to survive after the bite in his leg has left him balancing between delirium and death. I’m afraid that if we don’t fix his leg soon, he’s not going to survive.
I’m glad he’s here with me. I’m glad that all of them are. No matter how terrible I feel at the moment, whenever I look over at Charlie, I can’t help but feel that flicker of hope deep down inside of me. It’s a warmth that will not be denied, however depressed I feel at the moment. His little face makes everything seem brighter. As for Lexi and Greg, I’m just glad that they’re here with me. Being alone is possibly the worst thing she could think of at this moment. Being alone out here in a world that’s full of death and emptiness. No, I’m grateful for all of them.
But there could have been more. Closing my eyes, I picture the friends that I’d spent the whole last year with. Friends who were now dead or lost. I think of how far away the beach house is in Florida and how much danger and death is in between us. There’s no way I’m ever going to be able to get to them. They’re nothing but shadows in the past and as I close my eyes, I can see their faces, but they’re standing behind the dead. I can see Marco, clinging to the fence as those things chew on his flesh, tearing his skin and muscle from his bones. Henry looks at me with a crossbow dart sticking in his battered and bruised head, blood trickling down his face. Then there’s Noah, missing half of his face, staring at me from behind the glass of the farmhouse. I can see him as those things claw at his face that I had worked so hard to salvage. He’s gone like all of the others, entirely lost to us. Their sacrifices so far had been in vain. We haven’t found what my father was spurring us onward to. So far, we’ve only found death and pain beyond the beach house.
Noah has been on my mind since the moment we left the farmhouse. Since the moment I saw him standing behind the window, the monsters pulling him apart, I couldn’t help but feel like I was a monster toward him. I treated him with disdain and hatred. To me, Noah had always been a nuisance that just tagged along because he was dating my sister. But there at the end, I think that he was probably the most heroic of us all. He wasn’t foolish, but he was a dick. Toward the end, everything sort of got to him. It changed him. He grew darker and more distant, but when push came to shove, he was the bravest out of us. He never gave up and when he saw the chance to give his life for something greater, he took it. Giving his life to save my nephew is something that I will never forget. I wonder if Greg or Lexi could be that brave. I don’t know if I could.
“We’re almost out of gas,” Greg gasps. I look at him. He looks like he’s sweating profusely. I feel a sinking sensation in my stomach. Without getting a good look at him, it’s hard to tell.
“Find somewhere open to stop,” I tell him. I don’t want to stop near a parked car or anything like that. It’s not something I relish thinking about, but everything is dangerous out here. A parked car could hide bandits on the other side, or the shadow of a dilapidated building could house a flock of monstrous cannibals. I’m not comfortable with anything now. The open is all I feel safe in anymore. Those who experience these things will no doubt adjust to the same method. Until we are all healthy and at our full strength, we don’t have the luxury of clearing out buildings or holding positions. I look at my hands and know that until my wounds heal, I won’t be able to properly hold a weapon. I can do it, but it hurts excruciatingly. I would prefer to have Greg and Lexi at full strength with me as well.
As the truck comes to a complete stop, I look around at the dead trees to the south that form some kind of forest that once was. To the north, I look at Dayton and wonder what’s waiting for us. It’s my job to fill up the car. Lexi’s in no condition, and Greg can hardly stand on his leg, let alone walk with it and use it to lift a heavy gas can. It falls to me, but I need a moment. I just need a second to get together what I need emotionally. I’m not excited about the prospect of getting up. I’m exhausted and I’ve been sitting in a car for days now. Blinking, I lean forward and push open the door.
“Switch me spots,” I tell Greg coldly. I’m not interested in arguing. He’s ill and I’m the only one with the strength to keep going. I don’t realize how harsh my voice is until the words have escaped me, and I immediately feel terrible for having spoken so harshly too him. I look at the back of his head as his shoulders slump and I feel bad, but I don’t say anything. I don’t have much to say to my traveling companions anymore. I don’t have much to say to anyone anymore. I step outside and stretch, confident that we’re alone.
We’re close enough to the city on the horizon that someone with a pair of binoculars might catch sight of us, but I’m not overly scared. Even if they have a sniper rifle, they couldn’t hit us, yet. Turning around, I look at the bed of the truck that used to be stocked with everything we could have possibly needed to make our travel the most comfortable and well supplied as possible. Now, we hardly have a thing. Torn bags, broken boxes, scraps and pieces of the bounty we once held onto. I hang my head, feeling sick to my stomach at the destruction of everything we once had. How did everything turn out so terribly?
Grabbing the gas can, I haul it out of the back of the truck, feeling that it’s halfway empty. We’re going to be in trouble if we don’t find our destination soon. I suppose that I should be worried, but I think that we’ve experienced a whole lot worse than having to walk. Looking back toward the truck, I’m not sure if Greg would even be able to walk. I need to check on him, no matter what he says. I need to make sure that he’s safe. I need to make sure that he’s not worse off than he’s willing to tell me.
Lifting the tank and pouring every last drop into the gas tank, I think over what it was my father said. I think about his last words, the map that I’ve committed to memory, burning it into my brain as I look at the gas container. I’m not sure if I have faith anymore in getting there. I think about the name Jason over and over again. I think about how impossible it seems to get to him. How can we even possibly hope to make it to him when we’ve done so terribly thus far? I look at the carnage in our wake and I can’t help but feel the despair sinking in. I’ve done a terrible job with all of this. I’ve done so horribly that I can hardly stand it. I want to scream and pull my hair out. I want to throw this stupid gas tank out into the dust and crumple to my knees and cry for the rest of my days. I want to just give in to all of it. I want to surrender. But I can’t. The dead are watching, holding their infernal gaze to our actions and I feel sick just thinking about how I’ve failed them. I keep pouring, keep hoping that there’s something better on the horizon for us.
I can picture Jason’s location on the map in my mind. I can see the X as clear as I can see the can in my hands, but that X is so vague, so completely unclear that I can’t help but want to scream at the obscurity of it. There’s no pinpoint, exact location on the map, just an X. We don’t have an address, a street name, or anything to go on. We just have a location to the north and west of Dayton. I feel sick thinking about how much there is out there and how little we have to work with. I try to remember what my father said about Jason. I try to remember what he’d tried to tell us, but so much has happened in the past few days that I can hardly keep everything straight in my mind. The past week or so has been nothing but death, slaughter, dust, and horrors. I can hardly remember how we got here; let alone what spurred us on. I look to the north, wishing that I had binoculars with me.