“Really?” She looked across at me. “I never would have saw that comin’. I actually thought you would have been more of a boyband lover.”
“Hell no!” I snapped, feeling offended at her misconception of me. “I was into classics like Jimi, Clapton, I loved Bob Marley.” My thoughts drifted to a conversation I’d had with Emily and if there were rasta deaders. The thought soured my mood abruptly. I missed her already. And then I missed Mikey. And then I was pissed with myself for missing him. Stupid man.
“Sorry, Mom.” She snorted out a laugh.
She chuckled, and I smiled and then we lapsed back into silence, just the sound of our boots on the lonely highway. Though the road was quiet, I checked back behind, as did Nova, there was nothing coming; however, the road up ahead of us held movement.
We both stopped and watched for a moment or two, noticing that the shadows of people were clumsy and uncoordinated, and we both continued to walk at the same time.
“Deaders,” I said dryly.
“Yeah,” she agreed.
We both mentally got our heads into the places they needed to be in order to kill these things—the zombies. Since they were in front of us, they clearly couldn’t be ignored, which meant we had no choice but to fight them.
“I’m so over all this shit, you know?” I huffed, my throat feeling sore and scratchy.
“Deaders are assholes,” Nova chuckled. She finished her cigarette and threw it to the ground. “I definitely think you’re getting sick, girl.”
“I know,” I grumbled.
There wasn’t much wind, but what little there was typically worked against us and blew our scent in the direction of the deaders. We were closer now and could see that there were four of them. Scrap that—make it four and a half, since there was one on the ground. I couldn’t tell if his legs were partially missing or completely missing, but I could see his little head bobbing up and down to get a better fix on the direction of our obviously delicious scent.
The four able-bodied deaders began to move in our direction, their groans being carried away in the wind. They were slow, as usual, but they didn’t seem as rotten as the ones we’d encountered on the previous night, and that was worrying. In fact, as we got closer to them I realized that they seemed positively fresh.
I glanced nervously across to Nova, who seemed to have the same thought process as me. Her frown furrowed harder, her mouth set in a thin, determined line.
“They’re new,” I stated.
“Seems that way.” She pulled out two long-handled knives and picked up her pace.
I didn’t want to seem like the wimp in this situation, but I was not eager to get the killing over and done with. I wasn’t a warrior or a fighter. In fact, I could quite happily go without ever killing another deader—or person—again. Unfortunately, the world being what it was, that was unlikely to ever happen. I didn’t speed up, but I was ready for them regardless. I was always ready for them, even if I wasn’t as eager as Nova.
I reached the first one, side-stepping as it stretched its one bony arm for me. The other arm was barely a nub of bone left jutting out of its socket, yet it still moved. I managed to get behind it and I raised my katana high, slamming it through the back of the deader’s neck before it could turn around. The force of my blow knocked it to its knees but didn’t cut it all the way through, and I grunted as I struggled to wrench the katana free from the thick flesh and bone of its neck. I pressed down, begging the sword not to snap.
Finally the blade cut right through and the head fell from its shoulders with a resounding
splat
. The body slumped forward with a
thud
, and thick black gore that smelled like rotten eggs and three-day-old sewage pumped slowly from out of the hole in its neck. The mouth of the head continued to snap, and I slammed my sword through the side of its temple to end the deader’s eternal misery and then I moved on to the next one.
Nova was surrounded by two deaders and the ankle-biter, and I hurried across to help her. I jogged to her side, ignoring my own slow-moving deader, and I stabbed through the ankle-biter’s skull. Ankle-biters were scary, because you never freaking saw them coming. I had drawn the attention of Nova’s two deaders, but she stabbed one in the back of the skull before it could even take a step toward me, and the other followed swiftly afterwards.
I turned back to my one, sidestepping it and letting it follow me until its back was to Nova. She used both knives to hack either side of its neck in one swift movement, and the head popped up into the air like a jumping bean and landed on the ground with a small
thud
. It was still moving, jaws snapping away as it persistently tried to get to me, and I grimaced. It was possibly once a fairly attractive male. Cloudy blue eyes stared up at me hungrily, its teeth still relatively normal instead of broken and black. Even its skin, though pale and sallow, was still covering a full face, instead of having rotted away in parts, leaving us with a gory view of what lay underneath. I presumed this man had died from injuries other than the more standard facial bites, which were what usually got people killed.
Death brought on the zombie infection, not saliva or blood transference, and a chunk out of the face or neck was almost always a sure killer.
Nova’s boot made contact with the head and sent it flying through the air and into the fields to the left of us. Black blood trailed through the sky in an arc and she whooped and fist-pumped the air.
“Touchdown!” she yelled ridiculously. She raised her hand in an attempt to high five me.
“That’s not cool. You need to go find that head and end it.” I bent down and wiped my blade across the now headless deader’s body, cleaning it free of the gore.
“What? Why?” She bent down and cleaned her knives on a different deader’s back. “You’re just miserable. You’re always miserable, especially when you’re sick,” she huffed.
“You don’t know what I’m like when I’m sick.”
Nova rolled her eyes. “Well you’re sick now, and you’re a moody and miserable, so looks like I was right.”
“Whatever. You can’t leave a dangerous head out in the wild like that. What if someone is walking through here and doesn’t see it? What then? A dangerous head like that could kill someone.” I scowled and stood back up, releasing a hearty sneeze. “Go find the damn head.”
Nova stood back up, giving me a hard glare. “No, you go find the damn head if it’s so important to you.” She turned away and started looking through the pockets of another of the dead bodies at our feet, looking for anything useful. “No one would be stupid enough to walk through a field barefoot anyway. People wear shoes, Nina!” She pocketed several items, not bothering to show me what they were, which only pissed me off more, since we were supposed to be sharing everything.
“That’s a dangerous head, Nova. Go kill it.” I bent back down and started to fumble in my deader’s pockets, finding some gum and a lighter, plus a picture of a pretty woman. The picture did nothing to temper my growing anger. “Do they not deserve any goddamn respect?” I muttered to myself more than her. So I was surprised when Nova replied.
“No, no they don’t. I hate them all and they deserve to die a horrible death.”
My eyes snapped to hers. “You’re being a dick now.”
“Since when did you become a union leader for the Undead Society? These aren’t humans anymore,” she snarled.
“I know that,” I yelled and looked away, feeling my cheeks heat. What the hell was happening to me? A couple of months back in a real society and I’m turning soft. “Can you just go and get the damn head?” My voice softened. “Please.”
She scowled at me but stormed off in the general vicinity of where the head had landed, and I continued looting through the pockets of the deaders.
I remembered watching an old black-and-white apocalyptic film with my husband, way back before the world ended, and I remembered wondering why they never searched the pockets of the dead. I mean sure, it’s gross, but the whole world was gross now. Well, maybe not all of it. The world was actually quite beautiful now, without pollution and man destroying everything. Having been left to grow wild, Mother Nature had thrived and was truly excelling in her job description. But the rest of the world was ugly, and full of death and disease.
So a little looting from the dead? Pfft, that was nothing. If it meant living or dying then I’d gladly loot a hundred deaders. You never knew what crap people had previously carried with them, and on more than one occasion it had proved hugely beneficial. Unfortunately, every once in a while you found something utterly disgusting. Once I found shit in someone’s pocket—actual shit! It was disgusting and I couldn’t get rid of the smell from under my fingernails for days afterwards.
I slipped the photo of the beautiful woman back into the pocket of the headless deader and called it quits. Nova came back over, still scowling, but she had clearly done what I’d asked of her. I fell into step beside her and we continued our walk back to the truck in total silence.
Our truck was still there, with only a few remaining deaders nearby, thankfully. Enough that it was a pain in the ass, but not so many that it was a major problem for us. We killed the ones closest to the truck—well, Nova did most of the killing, since she was so damn quick about it—and we climbed in hastily before the others got close enough to eat our brains, and then we pulled out of the gas station.
“It never gets old, right?” She laughed, offering me her hand for a high-five.
I cocked an eyebrow at her and scowled.
“Come on! You know you want to bump this.” She laughed even louder, but finally relented when I made no move to high five or fist-bump her. “You’re always so serious, girl,” she pouted. “You need to lighten up or this is going to be one seriously boring road trip.”
“I just don’t see any of this as funny or amusing, and I don’t take it lightheartedly,” I snapped. “And it’s not a freaking road trip. It’s a mission!”
I was tired of everyone thinking so badly of me, like I was the only bitch in the apocalypse. Like I was the only one that took any of this seriously. Day and night, we fought and clawed for survival—what’s so funny about that? I typically wasn’t one for self-pity, but lately I was beginning to feel something akin to it.
“You’re right,” Nova began, “it’s not funny and nothing about this whole situation should be taken light-heartedly.”
I frowned across at her, waiting for the punch line to her joke.
“The thing is, though, darlin’, is this world is what we make it.”
“But there’s nothing left,” I snarled.
“Of course there is, don’t be so fucking depressive. There’s a whole world out there. There’s people to love, people to hate, and a future that we can build.”
I scoffed at her words and she held a hand up to me.
“If you’re always looking for the clouds, you’ll never see the rainbows.” She looked away, apparently done with her lecturing.
“Whatever,” I mumbled.
We traveled in silence for a while, the only sounds being the truck’s noisy engine and Nova humming to herself. She was still pissed that I had previously made her turn the CD off. She liked listening to music, but after the eighth time of listening to the same AC/DC album, I had called for a time-out. I loved music previously, any music really, yes, even Nirvana—not that I would tell Nova that. I loved the way so many different instruments could all come together to create one cohesive sound. It was fascinating and beautiful, and I loved getting lost inside it. But I also liked variety, and that’s something you don’t get in an apocalypse. I shuddered, pushing the thoughts away.
Raindrops began to fall, light at first, like a fine mist—the stupid sort of rain that is more of a spray, yet it drenches you from head to toe in seconds. Nova turned on the wipers and awkwardly lit a cigarette.
“I think we‘re coming up to where we left them,” she says, glancing over at me nervously.
“Which means your camp is around here?” I asked tensely. I had known that we would be reaching both her camp and the place where they had left Hilary and Deacon to go off on their own. I just hadn’t expected it so soon.
“It’s a couple of miles southwest of here—close, but not close enough that we need to worry. Not unless things have changed since I left.” She shrugged noncommittally, but I could see the anxiety at the corner of her mouth.
I bit my thumbnail and then silently cussed myself, realizing that I had picked up the filthy habit from Mikey. I was tense—tenser than usual. The thought of Mikey getting back to base camp and seeing me gone was driving me wild. Would he care? Would he be mad? Do I want him to care? I just didn’t know anymore. We didn’t have the most typical of relationships, though I guess no one ever did in this world anymore. Things weren’t like they used to be. With my husband I used to worry about who would do the weekly grocery shopping and if we had enough cash for takeout on a Saturday night. With Mikey it was all about survival. Would he make it home from his next scouting mission? Would I come home after my next scavenging trip? Would I ever be any good with a gun? Would I ever stop being such a bitch? I sighed heavily.
Nova pulled the truck to an abrupt stop, the brakes squeaking loudly, and I was yanked back from my thoughts. I grabbed my katana automatically, poised for a fight. I looked out the window and then back to Nova with a frown. She was leaning forward in her seat, her eyes trained on the distance.
“What? What is it?” I asked.
Nova didn’t reply, but pointed to the horizon; and I followed her finger, seeing nothing at first. Then I saw it: smoke. Gray tendrils of it lazily floating into the sky. The fire was old, not fresh, but it had also been big. And it was in the direction of where Nova’s camp had been.
I turned to her, seeing the anxiety etched across her face. “What do you want to do?” I asked.
“I don’t know, we should see what happened, right?” She looked at me, her eyes full of sincerity. “They could be in trouble.”
I looked back toward the smoke. “I think it’s too late to help them if they are in trouble.” I looked down into my lap, not being able to meet her gaze. “Do we even want to help them? After what they did?”
She was quiet for a beat before she replied. “They weren’t all bad. They just wanted to find a cure,” she said, her words hard and unforgiving.
“But that poor woman, what they did to her—”
“That was all Rachael. We can’t blame the majority for one person’s mistake.” I could tell it pained her to admit that, to say out loud that her sister had been seriously messed up in the head. But I didn’t believe that it was all Rachael’s fault.
I looked at her sharply. “Yet they all stood by and let it happen. How many more women, children, people have they harmed trying to find this cure?”
“You’re so fucking high and mighty, Nina.” Nova lit another cigarette, blowing the smoke out angrily. “What if it worked? What then? Surely the pain of a few is worth it for the cure?”
“You sound just as crazy as she was,” I said angrily, my eyes burning vicious holes into her.
Her mouth opened and closed as she struggled to come back with an equally cruel retort, but there was nothing crueler than that, so she gave up, the air leaving her as if she had been deflated. And I felt lousy because I hadn’t mean to hurt her; it was just that my stupid mouth making me say things before I really had time to think them through.
“Can we go see?” she asked quietly, almost as if she was afraid to ask.
I hated it when she did this to me, making me seem like the asshole if I said no to her. I mean, you can’t say no to someone that pouts this much!
I watched the smoke rising in the distance, imagining the horror that might be waiting for us. The horror of all the people stuck there—trapped, held prisoner while they were tested on in the hopes of finding a cure for the disease which had ravaged this planet. But deep down I knew we had no choice. This place, this prison camp, is what we’d set out to find. Sure, we were looking for Hilary and Deacon, too, but it was this place that fascinated me the most. Me and my morbid curiosity.
“It’s your call,” I said quietly, knowing the answer before she gave it to me. Because we had to help as many people as we could. Surely that was the point of being strong—to help the weak, the people in need. Without that, what were we? Animals? Probably worse. We’d be more like the deaders. And that was why I had come on this trip to start with, right? To prove that I wasn’t not bad—if only to myself.
Nova spun the truck around in the middle of the road, sending mud and dirt flying up around the wheels and then setting back off the way we had come. She eyed the road carefully, leaning forward as she drove and slowing down as she came to a thicket of trees. She turned down it, the long branches from overgrown brush scraping noisily down the side of the old truck. My stomach lurched and tumbled the further she drove, twisting in on itself in nervous anxiety. The road was overgrown and muddy as hell, and the rain had started to come down again—a light showering of pure freezing cold water that made Nova turn on the windshield wipers.
A mile or so down the road, she slowed down until we were practically creeping along at a snail’s pace, every bump and knock to the truck noticeable. She wound her window down and leaned out as she drove, all the while muttering to herself.
I wound my own window down, hating the smell of the fire and smoke that lingered thickly in the air, it made my stomach ache with worry at the thought of what could have happened there. And of course, selfishly, the thought of possibly driving into something bad, something we might not come back from, always made me feel really freaking dandy! Cue eye-roll.
“Here,” Nova said loudly, and I turned in my seat away from my open window and toward her as she pulled the truck down an even more overgrown path. We had almost missed it, it had been so hidden. “This isn’t good,” she said darkly. “No one has been down here in a long time. It wasn’t like this before.”
A chill ran down my spine at her words, but for once I kept my mouth shut. The truck bumped and shook as it went over the depressions in the ground and crunched over fallen branches. The rain was not making it any easier to see where we were going, and it was making the path slick with mud. I found myself biting down on my nail again, anxiety coursing through me, and when I looked at Nova I saw the same trepidation on her face.
She finally stopped the truck, putting it into park, and then looked at me with wide, worried eyes. “We’re here, it’s just around this bend.” She jerked her head to the left.
The smell of burnt flesh wafted in to us even stronger than before, and my nose automatically wrinkled in disgust, but I ignored it and gave Nova a firm nod.
“You sure you’re okay with this?” she asked.
“Not really, but I’ve got your back regardless,” I said, clutching my katana harder.
Nova smiled at my words, and then when she noticed my hand firmly gripping my katana, she did a quick inventory of her weapons again before giving me a firm nod and winding her window back up. I did the same as she drove slowly forward.
She hadn’t been lying, either, when she had said it was just around the bend. As the truck pulled around to the left, tall iron gates came into view, standing imposingly high in front of us. One of them hung loosely to one side, letting anyone or anything in. The wall surrounding what was left of the city reminded me of my own humble beginnings in the nightmare/walled city I lived in for several years. Which in turn left me with a distinctly bad taste in my mouth. My time behind the walls was not something I wanted to think about right then, and it certainly was not somewhere I’d envisioned ever coming again—yet there we were. I thought about what frightened me more, and decided it was the fact that I had just come face to face with my own nightmare. Nova had said that there were more walled cities, but I didn’t truly believe her until this moment. But now, knowing that there were more of those places out there, more pain and humiliation, more suffering and starvation, I felt anger burning in my gut.
I swallowed it down, barely containing the heavy grinding noise my teeth were making as I looked at the gates in front of us. Like most structures left in the world, the walls were covered in flourishing plants; green ivy clung to the walls’ surface, continually climbing ever higher. Mixed in with the ivy was some other unnamed plant, but one I had seen several times before. It flowered in the summer, sprouting bright pink and yellow flowers that reminded me that there was still beauty left in the world.
The walls seemed smaller, yet built with more thought and care than mine ever had. And from our vantage point, they looked much stronger. Not that the walled city I had been in wasn’t strong, because clearly it was—it had kept the dead out and the humans in for long enough—but there was something about this small city that spoke volumes in strength. I just couldn’t pinpoint what exactly. Perhaps it was because I knew of the horrors that went on within the walls?
“Well that was not a good sign,” Nova said darkly, referring to the broken gate.
“Nope,” I replied.
“Well, we’re here now, let’s gate-crash this party.”
We kept on driving, pulling through the open gate and into the city, carefully avoiding the debris in our path, and my eyes went wide as I took in the full horror. Nova gasped and pulled the truck to a stop before looking out of her window. I leaned over, looking out of my own window.
“Are they all…?” I didn’t finish my sentence. I didn’t need to. Nova knew what I was getting at.
“Dead-dead? Yep, looks that way,” she said.
“And the people?” I asked, staring in stomach-turning dread at the human bodies scattered everywhere, limbs removed, insides devoured, and heads caved in.
“They either didn’t turn or were put out of their misery by someone,” she said, beginning to drive again. “At least that’s what I’m guessing.”
We passed a non-zombie body and I looked down out of the window, seeing the person’s tortured expression. Most of their stomach was missing, a red and black gaping hole where their insides should have been. A single bullet-hole scarred the center of their forehead.
“But who did this?” I asked.
“Put them out of their misery? Or tore this city apart?” Nova asked, her voice devoid of emotion.