Ken’s face went pearl white as he realized his incredibly foolish mistake.
“Hold up,” Greg laughed. It was a strange sound, completely devoid of humor. “Why are we so worried?” He grinned in a mad way, desperate to absolve the situation. “It’s just one little girl! So what if she’s hanging out on the roof? She’s not
hurting
anyone.”
Nancy’s face was pained. “Greg, just her
presence
is making the animals
scream
,” she pointed out. “They can’t even see her, but they’re crying out like they’re scared for their lives!”
“Not to mention,” Ken barely whispered, “that whenever one of those creepy people has shown up, we were inevitably attacked by a hoard soon after.”
“Don’t say that!” Greg argued. His voice was hitting a high pitch. “That was a coincidence! She’s not going to bring zombies here! She’s not!” In his distress he began to squeeze Sarah a little too hard and she promptly started sobbing. Nancy rushed to take the baby from Greg’s arms, not mad at him, but full of pity.
“We can wait and see,” Ken suggested quietly. “She sees the smoke, but she hasn’t seen us, so maybe if we stay out of sight...” His voice trailed off.
Nancy nodded, though she immediately saw the problem. Even if they separated themselves from her completely, made absolutely certain that they didn’t allow her to see that they were here, their previous experience had shown that these people seemed to be able to stand their vigil - without food or water - for days. How long might she stand there? Long enough for them to run out of food? Probably. Long enough for them to become too weak to enact an escape if necessary? Likely.
“We’ll keep the windows shut and avoid any more fires,” Ken was mumbling to himself. “We won’t make our presence known at all and maybe... Maybe she’ll go away.”
Greg was squeezing his hands into balls and then flexing them over and over again. His eyes had a haunted look.
That night they had no rest. They gathered together in the master bedroom, sitting on the bed together, blankets wrapped around their shoulders. The only sound between them was the soft, carefree breathing of a sleeping Sarah, blissfully unaware of what was happening around her. Ken in particular sat up against the bed’s headboard, his knees up to his chest, gently rocking back and forth like a crazy person.
“Don’t blame yourself,” Nancy whispered to him at one point, but he shook his head and buried it in his arms. Nancy let him be after that.
Several hours later Nancy awoke with a start, surprised that she had drifted off. It was dark, but someone had lit a candle on the bed stand. Greg was out cold, his legs hanging off the side of the bed. He would surely be very sore when he woke, but for the time being it was worth it that he was getting a bit of sleep. Nancy hoped he was having good dreams.
She noticed that Ken was missing and felt her heart rise in her throat. She slid off the bed quietly, careful not to wake Greg or Sarah, and crept off in hopes of locating their missing teammate.
She tiptoed through the house, whispering his name. Every step made the floor creek, which made her twitch and grimace. She assumed the girl outside didn’t have superhuman hearing, or else she’d already know for sure that they were in here, but she still felt tense and frustrated to be making any sort of noise when she was trying to be as silent as possible. “Ken?” she hissed a little louder. She had just reached the top of the staircase when a voice whispered back from the older girl’s room. “In here,” Ken called. Though she’d been waiting for the response, the sound caused Nancy to jump and clutch at her heart.
In the bedroom, which was decorated in the style of a not-quite-teenager who desperately wanted to be all grown up, Ken was peering through what looked like a secondhand telescope. He’d cut a hole in the curtains of the window and poked the scope through so that he could see outside without the strange girl being able to see in.
“What’s up?” Nancy inquired.
“Found this in one of the boys’ closets,” he explained. There was a tangible level of fatigue in his voice. Nancy noticed that he was shifting back and forth on his feet as though trying to keep himself awake. “I thought we should probably be trying to keep an eye on her in case she does anything suspicious, you know?”
Nancy nodded, though Ken didn’t see because he refused to take his eye away from the scope. “Why don’t you take a break and I’ll watch for a while?” she offered.
“That’s okay,” Ken answered immediately. “I can go longer, no worries.”
Nancy’s shoulders deflated. She shimmied closer, leaned her head against Ken’s back, and put her arms around his waist. “It’s okay, Ken,” she told him quietly. “We all make mistakes. You didn’t know.”
He finally removed his eye from the scope and turned to look at her. He looked awful, like he’d been awake for several nights already and had spent them crying his eyes out. “It was a stupid mistake,” he replied miserably. “We didn’t even
need
a fire. It’s not even cold out yet. I just thought it would feel cozy, and... I fucked up, Nancy. I fucked up royally.” His voice was cracking. “We had a good thing going here and I’ve ruined it.”
“Shhh,” Nancy said as Ken turned and moaned into her chest. She stroked his hair and scratched his back to comfort him. “It’s okay, it’s okay. We’ll get through it.”
It took a while, but eventually she managed to lull him off to sleep by rubbing his head and cooing softly to him. She maneuvered him down onto the bed and pulled a furiously purple comforter up to his shoulders. For a little while she watched him sleep, twitching and making funny noises in what looked to be an unpleasant dream. Once he’d calmed down and seemed to have fallen into a deep sleep, she moved herself over to the telescope and took her first watch.
She could see the girl, but she wasn’t very well magnified. Examining the telescope, Nancy realized that Ken had been looking through the device without actually attaching any of the magnification lenses. She fingered through the options attached to a small rack suspended between the legs of the tripod and chose one that looked like it wouldn’t magnify too much. She slid it into the eyepiece and peered through again. What she saw made her jump back in surprise, her heart leaping along with her. She took a few long, deep breaths before she put her eye back up to the scope.
The scope was aimed directly at the girl’s face. She was stoically staring at the roof, her eyes facing a few degrees away from the angle of the scope, but not angled enough that Nancy couldn’t see every single detail of her face. They’d originally wondered whether these people were human or zombie. Now, seeing her up close like this, Nancy was beginning to wonder if they were either. Her pretty face was extremely pale, unnaturally so, lending to the theory that she was dead like the zombies. Her eyes, however, were full of color, just not a color that was generally associated with the living
or
the dead. The frightening eyes, which never blinked or twitched in any way, had no pupil, no cornea. The entire eyeball was one color, and that color was a dark, swirling red. As Nancy stared at them, her mouth hanging open, she thought they looked just as though they were made of glimmering orbs of blood.
Nancy was mesmerized by those eyes. Strange, frightening, hideous...and yet somehow beautiful. It was almost like staring into the eyes of a wild cat - so majestic - even though you know it’s contemplating whether or not it wants to eat you.
“What do you want with us?” Nancy whispered to herself as the moon rose high over the farmhouse.
Nancy had developed the ability to recognize when she was dreaming.
She was perched atop her apartment building, peering down on a silent city. There were no signs of movement, neither live nor otherwise. There was no sign that the apocalypse had ever happened; cars were neatly parked along the sides of the roads, windows remained whole and shiny in the sun, buildings looked as they once had. But the city was empty. It was as though someone had come here and built up this entire civilization, but forgotten to put the people in. Even the birds were suspiciously absent.
“It’s so lonely,” Nancy whispered to herself. Her voice carried along the wind, the only sound for miles upon miles.
“It is, isn’t it?”
Nancy didn’t bother to turn her head. Gramma Sarah sat down on the ledge next to her.
“What’s wrong, sweetie?”
Nancy didn’t speak for a while. She was busy staring out at the city, trying to remember what it had looked like with people wandering through it, busy in their daily lives, completely unaware of the insanity that would destroy them all. Eventually she pulled her knees up close to her chest and rested her chin on them. “They’ve found us, Gramma. I don’t know who they are or what they want, but they’ve found us again. No matter where we go they find us. Bad things are going to happen soon.”
“How can you be so sure of that?” asked Gramma Sarah. “You said yourself that you don’t know what they want.”
Nancy sighed. “They come and zombies follow. It’s happened twice already. What reason do I have to believe that it won’t happen again?”
“So you’re giving up before you even try?” The voice that carried to Nancy’s ear was one full of disappointment and sadness.
Nancy turned to confront the face of her internal struggle and found that there was no one there. When she turned back to the city it was engulfed in flames, the fire traveling up her apartment and licking at her ankles. She sat and watched the fire for a long time, felt it singe the bottoms of her feet and warm the air around her until it was almost unbearable.
She sat and watched the world burn.
Chapter Fourteen
Days passed. After the first few Nancy stopped keeping track. They slept and ate, careful not to be wasteful with what they had left. They took turns watching the blond girl and keeping Sarah happy and entertained. That was the hardest, strangely enough. That innocent little child knew nothing of what was happening around her; she was just trying to grow and learn, and it was up to the adults to help her with that. But it was hard to smile at her, hard to play and read to her, hard to pretend to be happy while knowing what might happen at any moment. Sometimes Nancy cried while she tried to smile, and Sarah would swat at the tears with curiosity.
It was a bright, sunny morning when they finally came. Nancy awoke to the sound of Greg’s voice crying out in a combination of anger and denial. She leaped out of bed and ran to the window where the men were staring through the curtains and down onto the lawn. She didn’t have to look to know what was happening. She could hear them.
The farmland was shuddering with zombies. They were mostly wandering aimlessly around the lawn, but some of them were already clawing at the doors and banging on the windows. A few had wandered into the barn. Nancy could hear the animals screaming and couldn’t help but wonder if it was simply because they were frightened, or if the zombies were actually eating them. The thought made a strange anger rise in her throat.
Greg was talking under his breath, muttering profanities and rageful words at anything and everything. Ken’s skin had gone clammy, his eyes glazed over. Sarah slept quietly, undisturbed. And Nancy looked up, up to the top of the barn, where the bloody-eyed girl had finally adjusted her line of sight and was staring directly at them.
“She’s controlling them,” Nancy said with certainty. Her blood was running cold as she locked eyes with the devil-child. “She brought them here to root us out. The others did the same. They control the zombies and send them for us.” Her voice got higher as she spoke, until she found herself slamming her fists against the window in anger. She longed to take the girl by the throat, to strangle the evil bitch to death. “
What do you want from us?!
” she shrieked.
She didn’t expect a response. The girl couldn’t have possibly heard Nancy’s question, and her lips never moved. And yet, Nancy, Ken, and Greg suddenly found themselves standing rigid, shocked, as their heads were filled with a sickly sweet young voice that hissed, “
We want the child.”
Before Nancy could begin to comprehend what had happened, Ken had snatched her back from the window and Greg had yanked the curtains shut so hard that one of the hems ripped clean open. They were all breathing fast and laboriously, as though the voice had been a physical punch to the chest.
“What the fuck was that?!” Greg exclaimed.
“They
are
telepathic,” Ken whispered to himself.
But the phenomenon itself was not what was foremost to Nancy, who felt her heart constricting. “I don’t understand!” she cried. Her breaths were quick, short, evident of a panic attack. “What do they want with Sarah?” Her gaze flew to the baby, who had woken and was making cranky faces at all the noise. Nancy ran to the child and scooped her up, desperate to hold her. Sarah wasn’t expecting the sudden movement and began to yell. “What do they
want
with her?!” Nancy cried again.
Greg tried to shush them both, which only made Nancy start to hyperventilate.
“The ‘why’ isn’t our biggest concern right now,” Ken insisted. “What we need to be worried about is how we’re going to protect her, not to mention ourselves.”
“There are too many out there,” was Greg’s input. “If we try to escape the house we’ll be swarmed. The car is too far away and if we can’t get to that...” He didn’t have to finish the sentence. “Plus there’s barely any gas left in it anyway,” he said instead.
“But if we stay here they’ll just bust through eventually,” Ken pointed out. “We have to make a run for it somehow.”
Nancy’s breaths were getting faster and faster, and they hurt like she had sand in her lungs. She wondered how the men could be so straightforward about what the girl-devil had just communicated to them. Perhaps they’d run out of fear. But
she
feared. She feared for Sarah.
God help me
, she thought.
If you exist, help me now. I don’t care about myself anymore, but I can’t let them have the baby.
“I’ll distract them,” she said aloud. The men took no notice at first, so she said it louder. “
I’ll distract them!
”
Greg turned first, his eyebrows pinched together in a lack of understanding. Ken’s face showed that he understood exactly what she was saying. Nancy took a deep breath and plowed on before he could speak. “That demon kid out there thinks that I’m Sarah’s mother, mark my words, so maybe if I make a run for it she’ll come after me because she’ll assume that I have the baby with me. I’ll run for the trees and when she sends the zombies after me you two can run in the opposite direction with Sarah.”
Greg’s mouth dropped open. Ken had begun shaking his head with indignation midway through Nancy’s explanation. “You’ve got to be insane if you think that we’ll let you go through with that!” he shouted. “It’s a suicide mission!”
Nancy knew it. She didn’t try to hide that fact, or that the idea of it filled her with terror. But she was tired. She was exhausted from the running and hiding and waiting for more danger to come. If she could do this
one
thing, give an innocent child a chance to keep on surviving, then maybe she would be rewarded with peace.
Maybe.
“The only way to get Sarah out of here and away from that...that freak of nature out there, is to distract them somehow,” Nancy insisted. She kept a stubborn set to her face and tried not to show how miserable her own plan was making her. “Do you have any better ideas? Because we’re not exactly gifted with a wide variety of options.”
“
I’ll
do it then!” Ken shot back. He immediately began rummaging through the nursery items in the corner of the room, snatching up a teddy bear and swaddling it in pink blankets. He shoved the result in Nancy’s face and shouted, “Look, it’s Sarah!” before stomping toward the staircase. The real Sarah started bawling in Nancy’s arms as she and Greg chased after Ken.
“Don’t you even think about it!” Nancy screeched. She grabbed the fake baby and tried to rip it out of Ken’s arms. “I’m telling you, she’s going to assume that the baby is with me! If you go out there it’s even worse than a suicide mission! They won’t even
try
to capture you first, they’ll just
rip you to shreds!
”
Ken snatched his bundle back toward his chest and pushed Nancy away before taking the staircase two and three steps at a time. “You don’t know what will happen either way!” he growled back. “And anyway, better me than you!”
“How the
fuck
do you come up with that conclusion?” Nancy screamed. She shoved the wailing baby at Greg and tore down the stairs after Ken. She snatched the neck of his shirt and yanked it back so hard that he coughed and sputtered and toppled backward a step. He whipped around and grabbed her by the arms, squeezing so hard that she actually cringed in pain. His eyes were shiny with moisture.
“You said it yourself!” Ken hissed, his voice full of anger and pain. “You may not have given birth to her, but
you’re
Sarah’s god-damn mother now. What do you think is going to happen if you sacrifice yourself, huh? Do you really think that Greg and I will do a good job taking care of her? Do you really think that two total fuck-ups like us will be capable of taking care of and raising a delicate little baby girl?”
“Hey...” Greg’s voice wafted from the background. He was bouncing a sniffling Sarah up and down in his arms. No one paid him any attention.
A few tears slipped from Nancy’s eyes and fell down her cheeks. Ken released his grip, leaving several angry red marks on Nancy’s arms that would become bruises. He picked up his fake baby, dropped during the argument, and continued toward the door. Just when he was reaching for the bookcase, something struck him hard in the back of the head and bounced to the floor. He raised a hand to the throbbing spot where he’d been hit and looked down. It was a picture frame with a photo of the farmhouse’s previous family. He looked up just in time to duck as a floral vase smashed against the bookcase right where his head had been. “What the fuck?” he cried.
Greg watched in shock from the foot of the stairs. Nancy’s eyes were streaming. She snatched the next thing that her hands found - a decorative figurine - and threw that as well. It exploded against the wall to the right of Ken’s head, spraying him in tiny porcelain shards.
“How dare you get all fucking chivalrous on me at a time like this?!” Nancy screeched. “Trying to absolve yourself or some-fucking-thing like that?!” She snatched up a pair of shoes that had been sitting near the bottom of the stairs and hurled them one by one. They made a satisfying thud against the wall. “You think Sarah won’t survive without me?!” she cried, her voice cracking horribly. “Well guess what, Mr Fucking Attentive?! I can’t survive without
you
!” On the last word she broke like a dam and fell to the floor, hard on her knees, and sobbed while beating her fists against the hallway runner. Greg took a step forward and opened his mouth, but he couldn’t figure out what to say. Sarah giggled a little at the sight of Nancy slamming her hands off the floor and Greg gently put his hand over her little lips.
Ken walked over slowly, his hands hanging limp at his sides. The fake baby was forgotten by the door. He slunk over to where Nancy was crouched, her forehead leaning against the runner, her hands balled into fists. He dropped to the floor in front of her. He reached a hand out tentatively, pulled it back when she let out a loud sob, and finally plunged forward with both hands and picked her up by the shoulders. The tears in her eyes were ones of fear and sorrow. All the anger had gone.
“Is that true?” was the only thing Ken could think to say. His hands were shaking a little. Nancy dropped her eyes to the floor and nodded. “Every passing day gets so much harder,” she told him. “And I’ve cared about you for a long time. I don’t know if I could handle it if you...” She reached forward and grabbed the hem of his shirt like a small child might do. “I can sacrifice myself for Sarah,” she insisted, “but I can’t sacrifice you. I just can’t.”
Ken leaned his head against hers and closed his eyes with a sigh.
Greg stepped forward. Sarah was yanking on his hair, and he looked extremely uncomfortable. He cleared his throat. “Um...thats, uh, that’s all well and good and all, but we still need a plan here.”
Ken stood up. “Greg,” he said, “there was an abandoned 18-wheeler on the side of the road when we came in off the highway. Do you think you could manage to hot-wire it?”
Greg’s eyebrows knitted together. “Well, I’m sure I could figure it out...” he replied slowly.
Ken hauled Nancy off the floor and pulled her close to him. She swiped at her eyes to try to rid herself of the tears. “You’re going to run away with Sarah,” Ken told the younger man. “Nancy and I will cause the distraction.”
Greg’s eyes went wide. His face turned a sickly combination of white and green. “Wait, you can’t just-!”
“Please, Greg,” Nancy whispered. Though she knew the result was nothing short of pathetic, she put every ounce of her energy into the plea. “Please, take her and keep her alive.”
They stared at each other, silent, unnerved, unhappy. Ken wandered off to the kitchen, rummaged through several drawers, and returned with something he’d come across several days earlier: a book of maps. He flipped through the pages until he found what he was looking for. He thrust the map toward Greg while jabbing his finger at a blue dot labeled as a marina.
“Based on the ramp we took to get here, this is less than a day’s drive away,” he explained. “Make for it as fast as you can. If you’re lucky there might be a boat or two still there that you can hide on.”
“Leave us a message,” Nancy added. “We’ll do our best to catch up to you, but if we haven’t come around within, say, three days...” She let her voice trail away.
Greg was shaking his head, panic and anger evident on his face. “I can’t go without you guys!” he cried. “I just can’t!” He tried to shove a confused Sarah into Nancy’s arms, but she stepped back with all the willpower in her body. He tried Ken, but the other man turned his back.
“We’ve made our decision, Greg,” Ken said in a firm tone.
“And I don’t get a say in that decision?!” Greg combated.
“Please, Greg,” Nancy begged again. “Please, do it for me? Take care of... Take care of your little sister, just for a little while. For me.”
Her choice of words struck Greg silent. He looked down at the little girl in his arms and choked up. He shook his head again, but when a little hand reached up and grabbed his chin his whole body deflated. “Fine, I’ll do it,” he sobbed.
Nancy stepped forward, bit her lip, and embraced him. “Thank you, little brother. Thank you for everything.”
Greg turned aside. He didn’t want to look at Nancy. It broke her heart, but she accepted that and moved away. To hide the fresh wave of tears that was coming, she busied herself with readying a pack of food, water, and formula for Greg.