We saw no one and nothing until about thirty minutes into our walk. The sun was going down and I was started to feel uneasy. That’s when a ramshackle shack came into view. It had what looked to be a galvanized metal roof with tattered curtains hanging in the window.
Ginny was staring at the shack as though it were a castle. “This is the kind of place that Ty might try to hole up in,” she said, breathless from our hurried walk through the woods.
I wasn’t so sure. This was a guy who had pilfered a lot of camping equipment and then headed into the woods. I was thinking that the great outdoors wasn’t really a problem for him. And the shack looked ominous somehow. Like a cottage in the woods in a fairy tale. You always knew something bad was going to happen in those cottages. A witch was going to try to put you in an oven or a wolf was going to imitate your grandmother and try to gobble you up.
I was still staring at the cottage through the dim light and sizing it up when Ginny gasped and grabbed my arm. A zombie stood not even thirty yards away from us at the edge of the woods. She was an older woman in a long floral dress that had seen better days and her gray hair hung wildly around her face. She had a slack mouth and her eyes were staring at us with hungry determination.
“Come on, Ginny, let’s go,” I said forcefully.
But Ginny seemed somehow frozen in her tracks. I pulled at her arm. She was a small girl, but she was too heavy by far for me to pick up and run through the woods with.
“Ginny!” I urged, loudly now.
The disheveled zombie lurched toward us, reaching out an arm for Ginny. I grabbed Ginny around her waist, yanking her violently and then pushed her in front of me until she stumbled forward. Not fast enough, I knew.
That’s when a shot rang out. I automatically ducked my head and so did Ginny, even in the state she was in. The report was authoritative and ringing and I turned fearfully to see the zombie woman was on the ground, no longer moving and eyes staring blankly at the darkening sky.
“Ginny, it’s dead,” I said. Not that it had really been alive before. “Come on, let’s go.” Because there was someone with a gun out there and I wasn’t sure if we were going to be the next targets.
Ginny whispered, “Maybe the shooter has seen Ty. Can we ask him?”
I really wanted nothing to do with the gunman, whoever he was. I wasn’t even sure I knew where the shot had come from. I scanned the area until I spotted the gun poking through a barely cracked window in the shack.
I called out, “Thank you!” toward the gun.
There was no response. The whole thing was making me jittery—the body on the ground, the attack, the gun, the creepy shack in the middle of the woods. The fact that it was now getting very dark. I was ready to leave.
But Ginny called out this time, “Have you seen my brother? He’s a teenage boy. He was the one taking care of me.”
The gun was pulled out of the window. Then there was a pause before a gruff voice said, “No. Go away.”
“You heard the man,” I said. I started moving away.
Ginny didn’t follow. Instead, she moved closer to the shack. She looked like someone who had finally hit some sort of an emotional wall. “Can you help us?”
“Already did help you,” came the voice.
“I’m very thirsty from the hike. Do you have any water?” asked Ginny.
Although I’d brought some water along for both of us, the day was warm enough that, in retrospect, it wasn’t nearly enough.
There was another pause from inside the shack. Then the gritty voice came again, sounding a little less forceful and more difficult to make out. “Go away.”
“Please,” said Ginny firmly. “You know you want to help.”
It was almost as if Ginny needed her faith in humanity restored. She needed to find a good person after having seen infection destroy humanity and seeing the worst side of humanity when she’d been hijacked.
Finally, the door to the shack was pushed open. Ginny walked right in and I followed with more temerity. But when my eyes had adjusted to the darkness of the home, I relaxed. The shooter was an old, frail man with a bald head and an old plaid shirt and khakis. Then I frowned. He was very elderly, yes. Maybe he wasn’t quite as frail as he appeared at first glance. He was wiry, actually.
“I’ll get you water,” he said abruptly. He strode away from us and returned with two clean glasses full of water. He’d even put a cube of ice in both glasses.
Ginny talked about Ty to the man. He listened with a stoic expression on his face. At the end of her story he said again, “I haven’t seen him.” But this time he added, “I’m sorry.”
I was glad that Ginny hadn’t asked for any food because I had the strong suspicion that there probably was hardly any in the house. I didn’t think that this man stocked much food even
before
the crisis and he certainly hadn’t popped out to the grocery store since.
I hesitated. Then I told myself that this man
had
saved our lives. I cleared my throat. “Ginny and I are going to head out to a retirement home where her grandmother lives. Her brother might be meeting her there. I don’t know … that is … would you like to join us? I’m heading on after that, but it seems as if a retirement home might be a good place to hole up.” I stopped speaking abruptly, feeling as though I was starting to ramble.
He was already shaking his head. “Not going to leave. This is where I was born and raised.”
I said, “But it’s not very safe here, clearly. And you probably don’t have enough food or water to survive for long.”
His eyes were blank and he shrugged a thin shoulder. “When it’s time, it’s time.”
A shiver went up my spine. It sounded as if he was planning on suicide. I was about to insist that he follow me out to the retirement home before stopping. It was none of my business. This was obviously a special place to him, despite the condition of the shack. If he didn’t want to leave it, that was something I should respect.
So instead, I just nodded. The old man regarded Ginny for a few moments, a sadness in his eyes. Finally he said gruffly, “I hope you find your brother. I hope he’s okay. Don’t give up hope.”
Ginny nodded. She walked out of the shack, after carefully looking around through the dark to make sure the coast was clear.
As I was about to follow, the old man looked away and said, “The thing out there. Find supplies. Find a safe place. That thing I shot. It used to be my wife.”
There was nothing I could say. I reached out and hugged him. And for a second, he clung to me.
Chapter Twenty
Ty
I watched as Charlie jogged up to the zombie family’s house. It felt creepy looking at it. You could tell it had been a nice family at one point—they had kids’ toys outside and a sandbox and even a garden with vegetables growing. It was so weird to realize that they probably just were hanging around outside, maybe watering their tomatoes or watching their kids bike around when they were infected.
My family, on the other hand, had
never
really been like one of those wholesome family sitcoms. Mom and Dad were
fine
, but they weren’t all that involved with Ginny and me. We didn’t have a lot of time together as a family with both of them working … and because Mom and Dad just liked it that way. For the first time since this whole thing started, I felt sad, actually sad. Here was this nice, normal looking family and it got infected like this. Now the family was running around trying to infect other people. What a waste.
Some movement out of the corner of my eye got my attention. I turned quickly in time to see the zombie family shambling in the direction of their old home. Did they have some fraction of memory left from before? Or were they just attracted to Charlie?
Mojo started a low growl.
I snapped to finally. They were definitely heading for Charlie. And when he put that garage door up, they might go right inside, which would mess up any plans Charlie might have for getting back in there.
I put my fingers in my mouth and gave a piercing whistle. Sure enough, the zombies spun around and started weaving in my direction. Mojo snarled and barked and appeared ready to run for the house, which he knew Charlie had entered.
This time I whistled to Mojo, who reluctantly followed me as I moved along the edge of the woods. The last thing I wanted was to lose Mojo. Right now, and after all I’d been through in the last few days, that might be the last straw.
The zombie family stumbled after us as I led them away. We were now fairly far away from the house. Mojo gave me an anxious look. He wasn’t happy being so far away from Charlie.
I have to admit I was pretty relieved when I heard the welcome sound of a car engine revving. When I turned my head, I saw it was an older model Ford pickup truck. The zombies turned toward the sound of the engine, but their faces stayed blank, not recognizing the vehicle as something that had once belonged to them.
I whistled once more to Mojo and we started running in the direction of the truck. The zombies couldn’t keep up and we easily lost them. Charlie stopped and pushed open the truck’s passenger door and Mojo and I leaped in.
“Are you okay?” asked Charlie, looking at both of us with open concern. “That took me a while. The keys ended up being on the floor under the husband’s jeans in the closet. Their house was pretty tidy except for that one pile. The keys I had didn’t fit the truck.”
“It was fine. You know how slow these zombies are. Mojo and I could have run circles around them,” I said. But I was panting just the same, and so was Mojo.
“Okay. So we’ve got the truck. Let’s head back on the road and get as close to our stuff as we can. We’ll grab it just to keep it safe since it’s so valuable now. Then I’ll follow you on the bike to the retirement community,” said Charlie.
We set out on the road, trying to get as close as possible to the point in the woods where the equipment was. I felt a lot better about life from the seat of the truck. It was amazing how you didn’t feel as exposed when you were sitting up high in a truck.
Charlie, who seemed like a really laid back kind of guy, was pretty tensed up until the point when we got back to the stuff and he saw it was still there. I guess once he’d had his stuff stolen, he was always going to think it could happen again. I helped him load everything in the back of the truck. Then Charlie drove to where he’d left the motorcycle, climbed out of the truck, and hopped on.
“Why don’t you keep Mojo in the truck with you?” he asked. “He’s bound to be more comfortable that way.”
I nodded. I was still trying to make sure I knew how to drive the truck since it was very different from the van. Actually, since I’d
only
driven the van, driving anything else was going to be a learning curve.
Charlie looked like he picked up on this. “Hey, you know where all the stuff is on the truck? Can you drive it?” His forehead wrinkled.
“No problem,” I said. At least I knew where the accelerator and brakes were. Luckily, it was an automatic. Anything else I could figure out later.
We set out down the road with me leading. I wasn’t going very fast, considering I wasn’t used to driving the truck. The whole time we were leaving the area, I had my eyes peeled for Ginny. I still felt really guilty leaving the woods. I could only hope that somehow she’d taken the van to see Nana. I didn’t want to think about what might have happened to her otherwise.
The retirement home was, as I’d told Charlie, kind of in the middle of nowhere. But there was a small town that I’d forgotten about along the way. It was the kind of small town that wouldn’t leave much of an impression on you if you were driving through on your way to someplace else.
Charlie motioned at me to pull over and talk. I put the window of the truck down to listen to him and Mojo jumped on my lap and stuck his head out of the window to stare at Charlie with a big dog grin on his face.
“Do you know anything about this town?” asked Charlie. “It looks really small, and right now, kind of deserted.”
I thought about it for a second. “I want to say that my dad mentioned that this town used to have a lot of people living here when he was a kid. They worked at a nearby mill. But then the mill closed down and years later a lot of the people in the town moved away. So yeah—it’s pretty deserted, I think. All the time.”
Charlie nodded, looking toward the small downtown. “Makes sense. I was just thinking that it might be a good idea to shore up our supplies. If it was easy and pretty safe and if we’re not taking something that might belong to somebody else.”
Especially since I was making a big dent in the supplies now. My mom always used to say that I ate her out of house and home. Teen boys are known for that. I wasn’t feeling real excited about taking supplies since the last time I’d done it I’d run into trouble. But Charlie was right. The supplies were only going to last for so long. And I wasn’t sure what the situation at the retirement home was. Maybe it was full of zombies. We should take this opportunity while we could.
“Sure,” I said, taking a deep breath. “Let’s check out the town.”
Charlie drove to a side street and parked the bike next to the building. I pulled in next to him.
We glanced around us for a few minutes. Then he said, “We probably need to always assume that there are zombies around. And even though we don’t see any people, we need to assume they’re here too, holed up maybe. I don’t want to break into any homes with people in them, so maybe we should knock on the door first.” He grinned. “Although that seems very polite under the circumstances. It’s just that I don’t want to destroy the windows or doors on somebody’s safe house.”
I nodded, feeling relieved. That was something I was worried about too. It was good that Charlie and I were on the same page.
So that’s what we did. We tried to be quiet, too, just in case there were any zombies to attract. The first place we saw was a diner right in the middle of the downtown. No one answered the knock and Mojo didn’t act like he heard anything, so Charlie knocked again—firm but not too loud. When there was still no sign of anyone, Charlie took his elbow and broke the glass in the front door. He reached in and turned the lock.