Authors: Megan Berry
“We need to get out of here,” Silas says, staring at the door, thinking.
Ryan presses a button on his wristwatch and it lights up. “It’s almost dawn,” he tells us, and my heart pounds harder at the thought of facing these things in the dark.
“Do you think we can hold out until its light?” I ask, and Silas nods his head.
“It’s probably best not to go out there shooting blind. They aren’t dumb like the zombies. They have a pack mentality, even though they’ve been domesticated.” Silas warns.
The dogs growl and snarl outside the door; the sound of their claws chipping away at the bottom of the door makes me shake as I run around gathering up our supplies. We pull the blackout bags off the windows since we’ll need the light, and then Ryan grabs Sunny from the closet and we all climb up on the top bunk to wait for the sun.
I feel a bit safer up here, if the dogs break in, they probably won’t be able to reach us before we can shoot them—though that depends on how many dogs are out there. I do worry about the bunk bed not being made to hold all our weight, but since none of us are overly large, I push the thought to the back of my mind. Having a bunk bed collapse underneath me is not even in the same category of scary as being torn apart by a pack of wild dogs.
We sit uncomfortably squished together on the twin-sized bed like sardines, guns out, backpacks and sleeping bags rolled up and strapped to our backs, ready to move out the second we get an opening.
Ryan tries to entertain Sunny by bringing up a few of the dolls, but she still starts crying every time the dogs do something especially noisy. I know that I should be helping Ryan with Sunny, comforting her in some way, but when the dogs break out in a loud chorus of growls outside, I’m just as paralyzed with fear as she is.
“They’re fighting,” Silas whispers, and amid the growls I hear a dog yip and cry out, and then a thud. The scratching stops at the door for a bit and we all listen, straining our ears to hear more whimpers of pain and then a loud chorus of growling.
“What the hell are they doing?” Ryan asks, but Silas only shrugs.
“I’m not the fricken dog whisperer,” Silas snipes, adjusting his gun.
Light finally starts to creep into the sky and just in the nick of time. The bottom of the door is starting to wear away, and for the last ten minutes we’ve been able to see a large canine snout with massive white teeth as the dog gnaws persistently at the hollow core door.
Sunny lets out a squeal, which only seems to spur the dogs on faster. More growling, and the black snout is pushed out of the way to be replaced by an even larger dog. Judging by its nose, it looks like a German Shepard. Great.
We sit for another half an hour, our muscles getting stiff, until the room is flooded with sunshine. “It’s time,” Silas tells us, picking up his AR-15 from beside him on the bed. The gun looks massive and out of place in this princess themed bedroom, but I’m really glad he has it.
The plan is to pepper the door with high velocity shots, and hope it will take out most of the dogs, before we make our run for the truck. We carefully climb down from the bed. Ryan carries Sunny. I hear him whisper for her to cover her ears, and I do the same. Silas stands, legs apart and with the AR held up to his shoulder, he aims for the bottom half of the door. The Shepard has enough of its head in the room now that I can see the whites of its eyes. They are either rabid or starving, and as much of an animal lover as I am, I don’t care at this particular moment. These dogs want to kill me, so I am okay with killing them first. They’re very obviously out of control and need to be put down.
Silas presses his finger to the trigger, letting the machine gun go full auto as he empties half the rounds out of the magazine. The bottom of the door is a mess. The thin wood is shredded by the bullets far worse than anything the dogs accomplished in the last two hours.
Silas lets go of the trigger, and I pull my hands off my ears and hold my gun up, ready. Silas creeps forward to push open the door, and I follow him like a shadow. Ryan takes up the very back because his arms are full juggling Sunny and her pink blanket.
The scene outside the door is total carnage. Four dogs lay dead, punched full of bullets, and a fifth dog lies further back, its bones almost picked clean.
“That must have been the fight we heard earlier,” Silas tells us, “they ate the loser.”
I shudder, and Ryan tells Sunny not to look.
We make our way down the hallway towards the stairs. We have no idea if we got all the dogs, or if the survivors ran off.
The stairs are still dark because there aren’t any windows in the stairwell, but I can see the light at the bottom, so I just tell myself to breath. Silas snaps around the corner, gun up, doing a sweep like some kind of well-trained military guy, and I’m impressed. We freeze when we see the dog standing in the kitchen in front of the huge plate glass window. It’s a massive black dog that looks like a mixed breed. He lifts his lip exposing ultra-white teeth as he growls at us, his hackles rising, and Silas squeezes off two quick shots. The first one hits the dog, and he goes down. The second bullet goes right through the window, making the entire wall of glass crack and fall to the floor with a loud clatter.
I stare at the gaping space in the wall. “Holy shit,” I mutter, “Shouldn’t that have been safety glass or something?” I ask, and Silas shrugs.
“Let’s get the hell out of here,” he says, and we make our run for the garage. The door is still shut tight like we’d left it, so we don’t have to worry about dogs in the garage.
I let out a sigh of relief as we burst into the garage unscathed. It must not be as well insulated as the rest of the house because the dip in temperature is noticeable.
Sunny and I jump into the back of the truck, and I’m shocked at how nice the truck looks and smells. It smells like bleach, which kind of reminds me of being at the swimming pool. Silas and Ryan did a great job.
“Nice job,” I tell Silas, and he shrugs casually as we wait for Ryan to open the garage door. He gets the door up about a foot and half when I see something that makes my blood run cold. Four legs are standing just on the other side of the door, and they aren’t zombie legs.
Silas sees it too and jumps from the truck to warn him. Ryan doesn’t need his warning though because he’s already gotten the door up high enough that the dog has his head through the opening and has clamped his sharp teeth around Ryan’s knee.
Ryan lets out a scream of pain, and Silas leaps on the door handle, driving the heavy garage door down with all his weight. The dog lets go of Ryan, and I jump out of the truck just as the dog is struggling to get free from the door, but it’s pinned down. Half of its body is outside and the other half is inside the garage with us, and despite the fact that this dog just took a chunk out of Ryan, I wince.
Silas pulls out his pistol and shoots the dog point blank behind the ear, and its struggles cease.
“Are you okay?” I ask Ryan, and he nods even though I can see blood starting to seep through the leg of his jeans.
“Get in the truck!” Silas yells at us both. “Jane, you drive,” he adds, and I help Ryan limp into the back of the truck with Sunny before climbing behind the wheel.
Silas yanks the door up, letting the momentum pull it the rest of the way as he runs into the passenger seat and slams the door shut. “Let’s get the hell out of here,” he tells me, and I pin it out of the garage.
“Stop!” he yells, and I look around in confusion as I slam on the brakes, making Silas bump his head on the windshield.
“Sorry,” I mutter, and he ignores me, rolling down his window and firing two shots in quick succession. I follow the direction of his barrel and see another dog slumped into the grass over by the trees. How many of them are there?
“Okay,” Silas says, rolling the window back up. “Now, let’s get out of here.” I go to put the truck in drive, but he puts his hand on my arm to stop me. “I’m driving,” he says, opening the door and getting out, coming around to my side.
I give him a dirty look, but I slide over to the passenger seat. I’m woman enough to admit that I’m not the best driver in this group.
“Are you okay?” I turn around and ask Ryan, and he nods. He has his pant leg pulled up. The bite looks painful, but there wasn’t any tearing at least. I stare at the perfect impression of a bite while he disinfects it, sucking in a deep breath as it burns and bubbles away the germs.
He hands me the bandages when I hold my hand out to help him.
“I’ll live,” he assures me and Sunny as Silas slams the door and puts the truck into gear accelerating a lot smoother than I’d done.
“Man, I can’t believe our shitty luck!” Silas vents as we get back on the road.
I nod my agreement. I mean, I can understand zombies, it’s the zombie apocalypse, but man-eating dogs…it just seems unfair.
I gently wrap Ryan’s leg, and he smiles his thanks before carefully pulling his jeans back down. “I was lucky back there,” he says, letting out a sigh, and I can’t help but admire him. I don’t know many people that would consider themselves lucky after being used as a chew toy.
“It could have been a lot worse, that’s for sure,” Silas agrees.
After making sure Sunny is okay and handing her a juice box from our supply, I pick up the map and stare at it. Despite all our problems, we’ve been making good time. That detour Silas took the other day, through the town where we found Sunny, saved us at least one hundred miles.
I start to feel a hum of excitement. We could reach the cabin tomorrow or the day after, at the latest, if this pace keeps up. I close my eyes and visualize Abby in my mind’s eye. We’re almost there.
“You would not pay a million dollars to eat McDonald’s again!” I snort with laughter at Ryan’s crazy exclamation. The road is a long, boring place to be, especially without an iPod, or the radio—I’m almost even sorry I tossed Silas’s CD! Without technology or radio, we’ve actually resorted to talking to each other.
“How do you know?” he challenges, but there’s laughter in his eyes.
“I’m not gonna lie,” Silas chimes in from the driver’s side, “I miss me some Mickey D’s.”
I roll my eyes at them both. When I’d asked Ryan what meal he would go back and eat again before the world ended, I had expected something a little more sophisticated than a Big Mac with super-sized fries.
“What about you then, princess?” Silas asks, and I’m surprised that he’s getting into our game. The miles fly by outside the window. We haven’t had a problem since we left the house that Sunny has dubbed ‘the bad puppy house,’ and it’s nearly noon. We are all in fairly high spirits now that we are finally back on the road.
“Beef dip and fries with a Caesar side salad…oh, and chicken wings,” I say, my mouth watering at the very idea, and both of the guys gape at me.
“Geez Blondie, wouldn’t all that stuff be against your cheerleader diet?” he teases, and I laugh. I was never overweight, but like the typical teenage girl I am, I deprived myself of everything good tasting in an effort for true perfection. I let out a very Silas-like snort and shrug. The apocalypse diet has taken care of any extra softness I might’ve had. Diets be damned, these days I’d probably eat an entire cow myself if we ever came across one.
I stick my tongue out at Silas, making all three of us laugh. “Hey,” Ryan warns us, holding his finger up over his lip, and I look back and smile at Sunny. The little girl is fast asleep with her head leaning against the window.
I’m kind of jealous of the simplicity of children. I didn’t get much sleep last night either, and I’d love to be able to lay my head down and rest, but I have this unshakable feeling that bad things will happen if I’m not awake to monitor the situation—it’s crazy, I know, but that’s what the apocalypse will do to a person.
“I’d go for pizza too,” Ryan says, rubbing his flat belly. “All meat, loaded up with stuffed crust, and bread sticks,” he finishes, and my insides quiver at the thought of eating a hot slice of pizza again.
All this talk about food makes me wonder what kind of food Ryan was eating in prison, before the zombies and his subsequent break out. You always hear horror stories…, but it doesn’t seem like the time to ask with Sunny and Silas around. I doubt it’s something he wants to share. Besides, I like him the way he is right now—smiling and happy.
“It’s funny, I’m even craving macaroni and cheese,” I tell them and watch as they both make a face. “I know,” I agree, not sure why I’m thinking about the cheesy junk I couldn’t stand before…
“You know, a box of macaroni isn’t beyond our culinary reach…” Silas says, and I realize with a start that he’s right. All we need to do is find a box and boil some water!
“We’ll keep an eye out for you,” Ryan promises, and I smile at them both.
It feels a little weird that we are all smiles this morning, but it’s just so nice to have a bit of a break from constantly running for our lives, fighting off the dead, someone stealing our truck, getting attacked by a pack of dogs... Not that we are completely safe now, but for once, things aren’t going completely sideways. We’re almost to the cabin, and I feel in my gut that Abby survived. This is the first moment since the beginning of all this mess that I’ve actually felt able to draw a breath.
We don’t see much zombie activity as we drive, keeping to the country roads to put distance between us and the small towns that randomly dot the area. We pass the occasional group of zombies in the ditch, but they are way too slow to catch up. After a couple hours, my heart eventually stops leaping out of my chest every time we pass the ugly bastards.
I get so good at tuning out the gruesome corpses outside my window that I don’t give the group on the road up ahead more than a cursory glance—until Silas slams on the brakes.
“What are you doing?” I yelp, looking back over my shoulder to see how close the zombies are getting. They aren’t that far away!
“There was something weird about that first zombie,” he says, intently staring out his window at the pack leader as it races up to the truck. The first zombie is dressed oddly. He’s dressed all in black, and he even has a little white clerical collar at his throat.
“That front one’s a preacher,” Ryan says, looking a bit stunned. The zombie raises his arms and waves them around like crazy in the direction of the truck, making us all lean forward in surprise.
On closer inspection, the guy is sweating like a pig in the heat of the noon sun, and the group behind him aren’t his pals, they’re chasing him. The preacher slips on some long grass and falls down.
“He’s still alive,” Silas exclaims. The man struggles back up to his feet just as the closest zombie gets a little too close.
Silas hits the door locks and jumps out, laying down some cover fire. The preacher ducks his head but doesn’t slow his pace as he makes his way for the truck. I watch the zombie right behind his shoulder go down with an exact bullet between the eyes. I think about getting out to help, but Silas has it covered, and I’d be no help anyway. The preacher opens the back door and flings himself inside when Ryan moves over to make room. Silas ducks back inside and quickly tucks his gun back into his belt.
“Praise the Lord,” the sweaty preacher manages to get out, after a few moments spent huffing and puffing to catch his breath. “Thank you so much,” he pants, and none of us are quite sure what we should say. We stare at him like the oddity he is—a preacher roaming the countryside in the middle of a zombie outbreak. It’s kind of like seeing a fish walking around on legs!
The first zombie reaches the truck and beats against the window, making Sunny wake up with a shriek. She looks blearily around. Her eyes land on the preacher, and she screams again.
“It’s okay,” Ryan soothes her as Silas slams the truck into gear.
We peel away, leaving behind a cloud of dust and a spray of loose gravel, and Sunny finally starts to calm down. I glance into the back and see the preacher eying Sunny as she sniffles and burrows her face into Ryan’s side.
“You from around here?” Silas asks, obviously not feeling tongue-tied in the presence of a man of the cloth.
“Yes, sir. Born and raised,” the preach replies, seeming weirdly chipper for a guy that was almost a zombies lunch. “Would you good folks mind giving me a lift back to my church?” he asks, and I’m surprised.
“You’re holed up in a church?” Ryan asks, obviously feeling as curious as I am, and the preacher nods.
“We sure are. It helps us feel closer to Him. The name’s Ted Danvers,” he reaches out to shake Ryan’s hand, but Ryan notices the zombie crud on his hand and pauses awkwardly.
“Oops, sorry about that,” Ted Danvers says with an odd little laugh, and thankfully, for Ryan, he puts his hand down without insisting on the shake.
“Is this church close by?” Silas asks, and I hope for Danvers’s sake it is. I don’t think Silas is above making a preacher walk back to his church through a zombie wasteland, if it goes too far out of his way.
“Just back down the road a couple miles,” Ted says pleasantly as he points out the way. Silas doesn’t say anything, but he does turn the truck around.
“Thank you!” Ted says gratefully, reaching up to loosen his collar. “I was out trying to gather supplies for my parishioners, and that group back there started to chase me.”
“You have parishioners?” Silas asks, eying the new-comer in the rear-view mirror. Ted nods.
“Plenty of them, they began to seek me out when they first saw the signs of the Rapture,” Silas snorts at this, and I quickly look back to see if his cynicism has offended the holy man. The guy is examining the back of Silas’s head with curiosity.
“So where’s your bag, if you were out looking for supplies?” Silas asks suspiciously, and I almost open my mouth to shush Silas—not that it would do any good. I close my mouth and choose to say nothing…
“I lost it back a ways when the dead started after me,” Danvers says smoothly, and we all fall back into an uncomfortable silence.
“You kids all alone out here?” Danvers asks, causing Silas to look back at him sharply.
“We can handle ourselves,” Silas spits, and the Preacher holds his hands up in mock surrender.
“Never meant to imply otherwise, you obviously must have some skills to be surviving out here this long. You’re just awfully young—it’s a real shame…” The preacher trails off, and none of us say anything. “The church is right up here,” Danvers says, pointing toward the horizon where a big white steeple is visible.
We pull into the driveway, and I can’t help but notice all the vehicles in the parking lot. He must have a ton of people in there to take care of.
“Thank you very much, young people,” Danvers says with a smile as he sets his hand on the door, but he doesn’t actually get out and leave. “The Lord knew I was in need, and he sent you to my aid.” He reaches up and slaps Silas on the shoulder, making Silas stiffen at his touch.
“You’re welcome,” I say politely when nobody else opens their mouth. I frown at Silas; these boys really need to work on their social skills.
“Say, I have an idea. Why don’t you kids come on inside and take a rest from whatever it is you’re doing?” Silas is already shaking his head. “Break bread with me,” Danvers insists.
“Sorry, but we have somewhere to be,” Silas says bluntly, and we all watch Danvers’ face fall.
“Oh… alright then,” he says glumly, and I’m pretty sure we are going to Hell for hurting the feelings of a preacher. “I just wanted to let my parishioner’s thank you for helping me out. I know they would want to, and the church ladies always put on a great potluck…” he trails off and just sits there.
“You getting out?” Silas asks rudely, and I actually blush. I want to get to the cabin too, but being rude to a man of God just seems so….wrong.
“Maybe we could come in for a quick bite,” Ryan says finally after the man doesn’t seem to be making any effort to leave.
“That would be lovely, young man,” the preacher beams.
I glance around at all the cars that are parked haphazardly around the gravel parking lot. There doesn’t seem to be any zombies visible, but I’m a little concerned that some might come stumbling out from between the cars and surprise us.
We all bail out of the truck, but Sunny hesitates, shrinking back against the seat when I try to give her a hand down. “I don’t want to go,” she says bluntly, and once again I’m jealous of the way she can just say exactly what she’s thinking—I don’t want to go either!
“It’s okay, Sunny,” Ryan says cheerfully, “we are just going to meet some nice people, have some lunch, and then we’ll be right back in the truck.” Sunny still looks skeptical, but she reaches out and grabs Ryan’s hand with the blind trust that only children seem to possess.
“Good, good,” the preacher exclaims loudly, rubbing his hands together excitedly. “It’s just right through here,” he says, motioning us toward the front steps.
The church is quiet as we approach. Even though being quiet is a good policy whenever zombies are involved, the church almost seems too quiet for as many people as the cars in the parking lot suggest.
“After you, dear,” Preacher Danvers motions to the door, and I realize that I’m in front of the pack. I throw the door open and step inside the dim church. Everyone follows me in, bumping into my back when I balk just inside the door.
The smell hits us right away and we tense, all three of us going for the guns at our hips. A church full of living, breathing people should not smell like death. It’s so strong it makes me gag.
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” a deep voice bellows out, making my hand still just before I reach my gun, and I glance around quickly to see we are surrounded by three men, all pointing automatic weapons at us.
“Son-of-a-bitch!” Silas spits as the men motion us to come deeper into the church and shut the door.
Sunny lets out a whimper, and I wrap my arms around her shoulders. I want to tell her everything will be alright, but I can’t get the lie past my lips.
We all turn to Danvers to see what he’s making of all this, but he doesn’t seem the least bit surprised, and now there’s a half-demented smile playing across his lips that definitely wasn’t there before.
I see Silas’s hand inching towards his gun, but one of our captors sees it too and hits him hard with the butt of his rifle, right in the face. Silas goes down on his knees with a grunt of pain, blood running from his nose and trickling from a cut on his lip. Sunny starts to scream.
One of the men looks like they’re going to hit Sunny too, but Ryan bravely steps in front of her, making the three men laugh, and I slap my hand across her mouth to try and get their attention off of her.
A rather creepy looking individual with a bowl cut points his gun right in my face. “Don’t try being a hero,” he warns me, and I almost snicker. Me? Out of our entire group, I’m the one they pinpoint as being the badass that might mastermind some daring escape? Not likely.
“Take off that belt,” another guy demands, making me feel the furthest thing from laughing, as all my heavy weapons are yanked roughly from my waist and tossed to another guy who starts pawing through it right away.