“T-thanks,” she squeaked. Her heart was in her throat. She pulled herself up and got herself into a steady position.
“Be careful,” Ken begged. He took another shot and bulls-eyed a zombie’s face. Blood splattered everywhere. “The rifle is going to have quite a kick, so make sure you’ve got your balance.”
He’d showed her earlier how to properly position the gun against her body to avoid breaking or dislocating her shoulder, but now that she actually had to do it she felt sure that she was going to either maim herself or go flying like a clumsy fool down the side of the cabin. With a deep breath held tight in her lungs she aimed at a zombie that was reaching his arms in her direction. She squeezed the trigger. The backlash of the rifle driving into her shoulder almost sent her off-balance, but she managed to retain her footing at the last second. She peered down to see that she’d blown apart the top of the zombie’s head. Though a thoroughly disgusting sight, she couldn’t help but feel a morbid sense of pride. “I got one!”
“Excellent,” Ken praised as he reloaded. “But don’t celebrate yet. They’re coming out in droves.”
Her little bubble popped. He was right. It wasn’t an enormous hoard such as they’d seen before, but there had to be at least a hundred appearing from every direction. Some were clawing at the house in a desperate attempt to climb it, others shambling toward them from the trees. Nancy tried to keep calm and aim well. They were, for all intents and purposes, safe from this vantage point. Her next few shots were a little shaky, but the more she picked off the more confidence she found. Soon she was blowing up as many rotting skulls as Ken was. The situation was disturbing to say the least, but also strangely satisfying.
When everything within sight was bleeding on the forest floor, Ken took a deep breath. “Okay, let’s move quickly before any more show up.”
They ditched the superfluous rifles as planned, flung themselves back into the attic, and sprinted toward the door. A zombie with most of its throat torn out was waiting when Ken pulled it open, but he was quick to splatter its head all over the small porch before it could make a single motion toward him. Nancy couldn’t help but stare; the zombie was wearing camo gear. She wondered if they’d just killed this particular zombie with his own gun.
Ken checked the compass and took off in what seemed like a random direction. Nancy tried to trust that he knew what he was doing. She had never so much as traveled outside the city on her own before, so she put all her faith in him to lead her. They moved for a long time, jogging rather than running to conserve energy, until they reached a river. Nancy sat on a large rock and stretched her legs while Ken poured over the map he’d taken with him. “I think we just have to follow the river West,” he was muttering to himself.
A low groan had Nancy back on her feet immediately, rifle tight in her hands. Ken’s head whipped in the direction of the sound, but neither of them saw anything. They crept along the riverbank foot by foot, keeping close together, until Ken stopped dead and Nancy almost tripped over him. He pointed downstream and she saw what had caught his eye. A small boat, a canoe she guessed, was pulled most of the way up onto the shore. At first glance it seemed like a godsend - they could float down the river! - but upon further inspection she saw that the wooden structure was positively drenched in red liquid.
They approached with caution, rifles raised, ready for whatever might pop up. They weren’t ready for what was instead laying there, staring up at them. Nancy turned her head and let out a single, violent gag. Ken squeezed his eyes shut and took a deep breath.
The thing that used to be a young man was torn into at least a dozen pieces, his insides staining the boat in a dark, horrifying hue. The eyes in his disembodied head were glassy and wet, and turned to stare at them as they approached. Some body parts were scattered around the immediate area, while others seemed to be missing. Nancy wondered to herself whether those parts had been eaten by zombies or by other hungry scavengers.
“Can we still use the boat?” she asked, doing her best to keep her eyes averted.
Ken examined the vessel with his mouth and nose in his elbow to avoid the smell. “I think so,” he mumbled through his sleeve. “It doesn’t look like there’s anything wrong with it. In fact, I don’t think he ever made it to the water. I think they got him while he was trying to drag his boat into the river.”
Nancy tried very hard not to imagine the scene.
As quickly as he could, and trying to hold back the contents of his stomach, Ken began picking the body parts and slimy entrails out of the boat. He kicked the head and upper torso out of the boat and shot the dismembered zombie in the head as it hissed and spit at him. Nancy stood resolutely with her back him, keeping her gun trained toward the trees in case they were found. She tried to ignore the squishy sounds that the body parts made as they plopped onto the ground. There wasn’t much to do about the blood that was left behind. Most of it had soaked into the wood already. After a bit of deliberation Ken used some wet rocks and river grass to wash off as much as he could, and then lined the inside of the boat with some dirt and leaves.
“That’s the best I can do, I think,” he announced when he was done.
Nancy examined his work. “It’s great,” she lied. “Anything that lets us rest our feet while we travel.”
Pushing the boat into the river and jumping in was an enormous relief to both of them, more than they’d realized it would be. Ken’s back was killing him from carrying the larger bag, and Nancy’s legs were burning from multiple days travel in a row. Normally they may have been able to survive a lot longer, but the aches and pains were exacerbated by a lack of decent food. Their muscles were begging for about a month of peace to recuperate.
The river pushed them along, not as fast as they might have wanted, but at least as fast as they would have been on foot.
“Nancy?”
Ken’s voice made her jump. She realized that she’d been drifting off. Ken was looking at her earnestly, like he had something that he was dying to say.
“Yes?”
He seemed to struggle with the words. “You... You know that I’ve loved you for a long time, right?”
Despite everything, his confession actually felt like a huge surprise, and for a moment Nancy had no idea what to say. “I mean,” he coughed, “it’s silly, I guess, but when we used to talk at the bar all the time, I just- I always felt like you were the perfect woman, but I never had the guts to actually make a move.” He shot her a sheepish smile and looked around as though to indicate how things had changed. “Seems pretty pathetic now, huh?”
“I liked you too,” Nancy blurted once she’d found her tongue. Just talking about it seemed dumb somehow, given all that they’d been through and had yet to go through. “I always thought you were so handsome and funny and sweet, but I was too much of a wuss to ask you out or anything.”
“Wow,” Ken chuckled. “It just took the apocalypse to get us together.”
The joke was in bad taste, and it wasn’t even funny in any case, but somehow they found themselves laughing. They laughed until their stomaches hurt, until tears came to their eyes. As they sat there, wiping the mirth from their faces, they looked at each other and eventually became sober once again. Nancy placed down her rifle and adjusted herself so that she could lean her body against Ken’s. It wasn’t terribly comfortable, and they had to keep their eyes on the shorelines just in case, but for a while they floated down the river and tried to just enjoy the warmth of being together.
She was still in the canoe, so it took Nancy a few minutes to realize that she was dreaming again. It may have taken her even longer if she hadn’t turned her head to speak to Ken and found Gramma Sarah sitting beside her instead.
“Sorry to disappoint you, my dear,” said the old woman.
“It’s okay,” Nancy replied. “I just hadn’t realized that I drifted off.”
They watched the river together as they floated along. Nancy wasn’t sure if it was a trick of the eye, or perhaps her sleepy mind embellishing things, but she would have sworn that the water had a strong red cast to it.
“Why do you keep coming to me in my dreams, Gramma?” Nancy asked. She’d been wondering for a while. It seemed like a good time to ask.
Gramma Sarah dipped a thin, weathered hand into the river and stroked the surface of the water before speaking. “I’m not coming to you, Nancy dear. You’re bringing me.”
Nancy considered that.
Gramma Sarah continued. “You’ve been through a lot child, and your subconscious calls out for the familiar: something to keep you grounded.” Her wrinkled face turned, her eyes boring into Nancy’s. “But you’re going to have to let go of me soon. You’re going to have to leave the past behind, forget everything you thought you knew, the things you thought were important. You have to move toward the future.”
“What future?” Nancy retorted, not angrily, but with fatigue. “How long can we run? How much fight do I have left in me?”
“As much as you need in order to fight for what is important.”
The surface of the river rippled as a large fish appeared to jump at a fly. Nancy frowned. “If you’re not really here, then why do I feel like you know what’s going to happen to me?”
Gramma Sarah smiled, a sad, tired smile. “Who said I’m not really here?”
“Nancy!”
A hand was shaking her shoulder. The dream faded away as she opened her eyes and yawned. “I’m sorry, Ken,” she moaned. “I didn’t mean to drift off.”
“No, Nancy, look!” Ken took her chin in his hand and forced her head to turn to where he was pointing.
The river had brought them out to a wider body of water that looked to be a strait, and along the shoreline of that strait was a town. About a mile down the edge of that town Nancy could see a long wharf and several large boats. Her heart skipped a beat. “Is that the marina?” she asked.
Ken squeezed her shoulder. “I think so,” he replied. He pointed again, in a different direction this time. “Look there.”
They were floating close to a group of small commercial buildings, including a convenience store that had a strange bit of graffiti on it in neon yellow spray-paint. It was an enormous heart with with “N+K” written in the center. Nancy had to fight the urge to laugh out loud. Ken muttered, “Cute, Greg, cute,” under his breath with a twitch of a smile on his lips.
They looked at each other and smiled, and for a moment they both truly believed that they were about to catch up with Greg and Sarah and all would be right again for a while.
And then the canoe suddenly shifted beneath them and they were tossed into the freezing water.
Chapter Sixteen
It felt as though all of Nancy’s senses had been striped from her and she was simply floating in a void. Then the bitter chill of the water surrounded her body, the salty burn of it found her lips and nostrils and stung her eyes. Her ears filled with the steady thrum of water pressure, but underneath there was something else: a low, constant moan.
Panic set in as she realized what was happening. They’d floated into shallow water. Above her, a mere foot out of reach, was their overturned canoe. Beside her, red in the face and looking as though he was choking, was Ken. And all around them were the dead, oblivious to the water that filled their decomposing lungs. The murkiness of the water hid the zombies’ numbers, but she could see at least ten. She tried to swim away from them, but between her panic and the slow motion movements of being underwater she wasn’t fast enough. Before she had even come to grips with the situation one zombie had her by the hair, another by the arm. All she wanted to do was shriek, but when she parted her lips water rushed in and choked her.
Then all at once the water exploded into brilliant flowers of red. Ken had hauled back with one of the rifles and shoved the barrel into the eye socket of the zombie holding Nancy’s arm. Moving as fast as he could under the pressure of the water, he then turned, ripping the rifle along with him, and thrust the butt of it into the face of the zombie that had Nancy’s hair.
It was like moving through molasses. All Nancy could think to do was move, move as fast as she could in whatever direction was available. She chose to go up first. It was an immense relief to taste air again and to have Ken’s head break the surface next to her. That relief dissipated immediately as the clammy, dead hands continued to paw at them from beneath the gentle waves.
“Swim!” Ken sputtered stupidly. He was coughing up what looked like buckets of saltwater.
Shore felt like a hundred miles away and the zombies were everywhere, barely hidden under the dark water. Nancy kicked and screamed and cried while she swam, her boots connecting with jaws, her hands squishing past grimy hair that felt like seaweed. Several times she felt jagged, claw-like fingernails ripping at her skin, but she couldn’t stop moving. She had to keep going forward, to get to the shore where they could at least run. Her feet weren’t on solid ground for more than half a second before she was off at a sprint. It was several seconds later before her heart leaped in her throat and she turned around to find that Ken hadn’t yet followed her out of the water. In fact, he wasn’t visible at all. By the time she had sprinted back to the water line his head reappeared, but there was a great deal of blood pooling around him and Nancy couldn’t tell whether or not it was his.
As Nancy threw her hand out to grab at her lover, a dozen slimy hands shot out of the water and tried to pull Ken down. For a heartbeat Nancy almost pulled her hand back and ran, but instead she threw herself at the water, snatched Ken by both arms, and pulled as hard as she could. Her arms and ankles flared with the pain of dozens of fingernails clawing at her as she and Ken tumbled backward into the rocky shoreline. Nancy scrambled to her feet. Ken didn’t. Nancy didn’t waste time to find out why. With her body screaming under the weight, she hauled him up under his arms and stumbled away from the death-filled water. She ignored the large amount of blood that was trailing behind them.
“We’re going to make it to that restaurant,” Nancy gasped, willing her voice to be confident. She kept her eyes resolutely forward as they blundered toward the nearest building. She thought Ken said something, but his voice gurgled in a strange way so she just kept dragging him along and refused to look at him. She could hear the zombies getting closer, the water dripping from their shambling bodies. A hand that had very little meat left on it snatched at her sweater and urged her to push herself forward a little faster.
If the restaurant door had been locked it would have all been over right then. The zombies were right at their heels, so there would have been no time to jimmy the door or smash the handle off. Relief filled Nancy’s throat and heart as the gold-plated handle shifted under her wet fingers. She tripped through the door, shoving Ken along in front of her, slammed it shut, and twisted the bolt against the outreached arms of the dead.
“We’re going to be okay,” she huffed. She bundled a heavily-breathing Ken up against the nearby host podium and immediately began running back and forth to the door with bits of furniture. “It’s going to be okay, you’ll see!” she continued as she moved. She could hear the panic in her voice but she struggled to sound reassuring. “We’ll just hole up here until they go away, and-”
“Nan-cy...”
She stopped dead, facing the door with a wrought iron chair gripped in her hands. She squeezed the metal so hard that her fingers swelled red and then white. The voice that had called her name was thick and wet. She was afraid to turn around.
“Nan-cy...p-lease...”
She shook her head in defiance, but she couldn’t stop her body from turning. She looked at Ken for the first time since she’d pulled him from the water.
There was so much blood that she couldn’t tell where it was coming from. Some of it had to be from the zombies, she thought, but not all of it. Some was pooling around his body, seeping through a large tear in his shirt that he was clutching at with one soaked hand. He was slumped against the podium, and from the looks of things it was the only thing keeping the top half of his body from crashing to the floor. His face had become frighteningly pale, except for his eyes, which were glassy and had dark rings around them.
He was dying, Nancy realized with certainty. There was no way to deny it. He was fading away right before her eyes. The chair fell from her hands and clattered to the floor.
“No,” she whispered. She dropped to her knees and crawled toward Ken, one horrible movement at a time, until her face was inches from his. She blinked at the wet in her eyes and repeated, louder this time, “No!”
Ken opened his mouth to speak, but he coughed instead. Speckles of blood went flying from his lips.
Nancy’s whole body was shaking as she placed trembling hands on the cool skin of Ken’s face. “No!” she cried again, stubborn, angry, terrified. “You can’t leave me now! Now now! You
can’t
!” She couldn’t stop herself from weeping openly. She buried her face into his shoulder and clutched blindly at his hair.
Ken raised a hand, pale and freezing cold, and gently stroked the back of Nancy’s neck. It was a futile attempt at comfort, but Nancy clung desperately to the feel of his skin against hers. “I’m...s-so...s-sor-ry...” his voice whispered in her ear.
Nancy’s mind raced to find some hope, some way she could help him, something to stop this thing from happening. With each passing second her heart plummeted deeper because she knew there was nothing she could do. Instead, she sobbed, refusing to let him go. She tried to ignore the coppery scent of blood and the cold of his skin and remember what it had felt like when their warm bodies had rested side-by-side.
“N-nan-cy...” His voice was getting weaker by the moment.
Nancy forced herself to look up. Ken was holding something that he’d pulled from the remains of the pack hanging from his shoulder. At first Nancy didn’t understand what he was trying to show her, but when she managed to focus through the tears she saw what it was. A hand grenade.
“F-found...c-ca-bin...” Ken tried to explain.
Nancy found herself shaking her head vehemently. She didn’t need any explanation of what he was planning, but she couldn’t seem to speak either.
Ken lifted his other hand, the one that had been clutching at the wound in his side. Nancy swore she could see bone beneath the blood. Ken didn’t seem to see anything anymore. He placed his wet, sticky hand on Nancy’s neck and guided her head down so that their foreheads touched. There were tears in his eyes, but also a fierce determination. Nancy thought that he looked like the bravest man in the world.
“G-go...out b-back,” he told her. “W-while you s-still can. Ff-find...Gr-eg...S-sarah...”
For the first time since she’d seen Ken’s wounds, Nancy realized that they were surrounded by the din of the zombies beating on the restaurant. He was right. She probably had only a small window of time in which she’d have a chance to escape the building before more zombies came and there was no way out. She had to go now if she was going to go at all.
“I love you...” she whispered as tears dripped down her nose and lips.
Ken blinked a few times. Nancy could tell that he was trying to be strong for her. “L-love...you...t-too,” he forced out.
It was the hardest thing she had ever had to do, pulling herself away from him. For a moment she considered ripping the pin from the grenade and clutching herself to his body so that they could die together. Only the thought of Greg and Sarah kept her from committing suicide with her lover, the man she might have married and grown old with.
She pressed her lips to his one last time, a good-bye kiss that was over far too quickly. And then, because she knew she wasn’t strong enough to look at him as she left, she stood and ran for the back of the building, weeping the whole way. Her heart struggled just to keep functioning, but somehow her body carried her through the restaurant, past the greasy kitchen, and out the fire exit. Her feet miraculously continued to move as the pavement flew away beneath her. A few zombies appeared in her peripheral vision and she jumped a short chain-link fence, hit the ground with enough force to send shock-waves through her ankles, and kept running.
She was about a block away when the explosion rocked the air around her. She tripped and went tumbling down the road for a few feet before finding herself on her elbows, staring wide-eyed back at the devastation behind her. Several smaller explosions tossed shrapnel in every direction as the restaurant went up in flames.
For a while Nancy lay there and stared at the fire. Though she tried as hard as she could she couldn’t banish the image in her head of Ken sitting in that restaurant, all alone with a live grenade in his bloodied hand. She felt like her heart was being crushed from within, like every breath of oxygen had gone from her body. She didn’t even have any tears left. All she could do was think about how Ken - wonderful, brave, kind Ken - was suddenly gone from this world. She would never see him again.
Nancy might have stayed in the middle of the road and waited to die herself, hoping to join her lover in whatever afterlife might exist, but when a few shambling bodies, burnt nearly to a crisp, began to stumble out of the fires something inside took over and she stood up. Her legs moved of their own accord. She began to run again. She ran through empty streets with the threat of burning zombies only a few blocks away. Without realizing she was doing it she scanned the buildings for the signs Greg had left behind. When she saw one her heart gave a strange lurch. She adjusted her path to follow where the sign seemed to lead.
Just as her body was beginning to wear down, heavy with fatigue both physical and emotional, she found herself stumbling into the marina. Her eyes scrutinized the wharf. Many docks were empty, but a few remained. Several of those vessels remaining were in shambles, but one in particular caught Nancy’s eye. It was fairly large fishing vessel that had been cut loose from the dock and moved about a hundred feet away from the shore. It seemed whole and unsullied. She was certain that this was the one Greg had chosen, not only because it had clearly been moved, but because the irony of the name emblazoned on the hull made her want to cry aloud:
My Escape
.
From somewhere behind her Nancy could hear the distant, echoing moans creeping toward her. Frantic, she searched for a way to get out to the boat.
There
, she thought, spying a small rowboat with a yellow heart spray-painted on the inside. She forced her body to move forward and staggered into the little wooden craft. It was all she could do not to collapse into it head first. With the last of her energy she untied the rowboat and kicked the dock hard to send herself floating out into open water.
Once she was away from the dock she allowed herself to collapse onto the floor of the little boat. Her body was broken, but her mind was alive and alert. It wouldn’t stop playing the scene over and over in front of her eyes. She was staring at the clear blue sky, but all she could see was the look on Ken’s face just before she turned and ran from his side. Her chest ached terribly. She should have stayed behind and died with him. But she needed to find Greg and Sarah. Ken didn’t deserve to die alone like that. But Greg and Sarah didn’t deserve to lose both of them in one fell swoop. She loved him. She loved them too.
Though her muscles felt as though they’d been pumped full of cement, Nancy forced herself to sit up and dip the oars into the water. Moving forward was the only way she could get any tiny bit of relief from her thoughts.
The access ladder was on the side of the boat that was facing away from the shore. Nancy rowed herself around the side of the vessel toward it just as the zombies began to appear from behind nearby buildings. She hoped they hadn’t seen her. Even though they seemed to be unable to swim properly, the thought of the hoard wandering around mindlessly beneath the water gave her no end of chills.