Apocalypse Z Ch. 01

Tina woke up to the incessant beat of rainwater on the ceiling of the attic, and a soft, almost imperceptible sobbing coming from beside her.

She crawled over until she reached a curled up body. "Paloma? What's wrong?"

Paloma shuddered and gasped. "I'm sorry. I was just... thinking about Kianna."

Tina swallowed. Paloma's face, wan and dripping with blood, loomed in her mind. She laid down next to Paloma and hugged her comfortingly, sliding her arm beneath her head so she could use it as a pillow. "Sssh. It's okay. I'm here, Paloma."

Paloma, Kianna, Tina and Kyle had gotten separated inside a dog shelter. Tina and Kyle had escaped out a back door, but Kianna and Paloma had been trapped inside. Tina had almost given them up for dead when Paloma came stumbling out, white as a ghost and splattered with gore from head to toe.

Over the next few days Tina had gotten the story from Paloma in bits and pieces, in screaming nightmares and weeping moments of weakness. Paloma and Kianna had been trapped in the rows of dog cages. Paloma managed to lock herself in one just before they reached her. Kianna had not been so lucky.

Blood had seeped under the cage as they ripped her apart head to toe. Kianna had been pressed up against the cage, begging Paloma to be let in as they tore her apart. They devoured her alive in front of Paloma, limb to limb and tendon by tendon, who had to watch her friend screaming for help as she died, but could do nothing.

Before Kianna had been Michelle. And before Michelle had been Axel. And Haylee. And Trent.

In the end, there were only three of them left--three since that fateful day where the sun shone over Indianapolis, the forecast was spring showers, a local football game had drawn crowds, and Tina had been doing some last-minute Easter shopping at the local supermarket.

***

Tina crossed another item off her list. She was making her famous honey-glazed ham, and her whole family--in-laws included--was coming. She tucked a strand of red hair behind her ear, half-listening to the television playing behind the counter.

"--illness seems to be spreading fast, causing rabies-like symptoms, and a new symptom has been identified--compulsive cannibalism."

Tina shuddered. She was easygoing and rarely got up in arms about anything, but this unnerved her. When were they going to come up with a vaccine for this thing? They had it under containment, but all it took was one escape, one infectee getting into the general population.

Something smashed to the floor an aisle over.

Tina jumped. Somebody screamed.

She ran around the aisle. In front of the shoppers, a man was lying on his back, shrieking like a dying animal as another man crouched on his chest, savaging at his throat.

Blood sprayed the linoleum as he hit his jugular. Tina was screaming, everyone was screaming, and her purchases went rolling over the floor as she dropped her baskets and fled.

***

Tina's hands shook as she drove. The sidewalks were milling with crowds, and the traffic was packed bumper to bumper.

Finally, she came within blessed sight of her neighborhood. But the road was blocked by a policeman, standing in front of a yellow roadblock.

"Please reroute. This place is quarantined."

"You don't understand. My husband Carl is in there!"

"This is an exclusion zone, ma'am."

Tina and the other cars were turned away, and she was forced to stay at a cheap motel for the night. She used the phone to call her husband--no answer. Her heart was thumping. She dialed another number, her brother Jake in Downeyville.

Outside, she could hear screams and shouts. She peered through the blinds as the phone rang.

To her everlasting relief, it was picked up. "Hello? Said an exhausted voice. "I'm sorry. I'm a little busy, I can't stay on the phone..."

"Jake, what's going on? Are you okay? Is Mom okay?"

He voices turned sharp and worried. "Tina? Oh my god. Tina, I tried calling you. I called your landline ten times but you wouldn't pick up. With the news coming out of Indianapolis..."

Tears were starting in her eyes. "I'm--I'm in a hotel. What's going on? No one's telling me anything. What's--there are road blocks, barricades, people are attacking each other, police are everywhere--"

"I--I think there's been a breach in Indianapolis, that disease, they've talked about it once on the TV and then they stopped reporting on it. Jesus, Tina, they say Indianapolis is gonna be quarantined, all of it, that it's spreading. Mom was out at Grampa's yesterday but she hasn't called, I went out looking for her but it was chaos--I couldn't go anywhere, people were fleeing the town. Oh jesus god Tina. Emma's still at school--I don't know what I'm gonna do. Everyone's leaving. We have to get out. We need to leave, all of us."

Tears were trickling down her cheeks as she saw someone light a bonfire on the street outside. The sudden blaze of fire reflected off her glassy pupils. "Okay. Okay. Jake, I'm gonna get over there and find Mom, okay? And I'm going to bring my husband, and we're all going to figure something out. I'll be in Downeyville tomorrow. Just stay put, alright--"

The electricity went out.

Tina stood in the dark for a moment, and it went back on, but she still stood there, trembling, holding the phone with nothingness echoing in her ear.

***

She checked out of the hotel that night, didn't ask for her deposit back. She took as many back roads as she could, inching through traffic, until she reached the stretch to her house. And it was abandoned. The roadblock had fallen over. There were no policemen.

The whole neighborhood was eerily deserted, from the gleaming black asphalt to the bright streetlamps bathing the sidewalks in yellow light.

As she inched closer to her home, the sound of her engine was the only noise in the neighborhood. The grouped houses stood still and empty, dark and empty but not a movement inside them.

Something lurched across the road. She yanked her steering wheel and bumped onto the sidewalk. It looked at her with blank white eyes in the headlights, jaw dropping with blood. Half of its skull was split open, brains hanging down to its shoulder.

A scream rose in her throat as her neighbor Seth Byrne shambled towards her, feet dragging, and she desperately yanked her steering wheel to avoid him, and she saw her house in the distance, and thank god, the lights were on, her husband was okay, and she was going to take him and they were going to get to Downeyville together, and--

Something was hunched over in their yard. Something crouching over a mass of black. As her headlights shone, the thing lifted its head, flesh clenched between its teeth, and Tina felt the despair slam into her like a cannon, hitting her so heavily she felt like collapsing.

Her husband of five years was eating someone.

Who he was eating Tina could not tell--their body was too ravaged. But the face of her husband, despite being drained of blood, pallid like a corpse, with those filmed-over eyes--

Carl. Baby.

Her hands shaking, she reversed, slammed the gas, and refused to look back. Whilst driving twice the speed limit, she saw other dark, lurching figures, other piles of guts and shredded flesh--some of which were beginning to move themselves. When she came into the chaos of downtown Indianapolis, she was blank inside, a black hole. She took the highway out of the city.

So did everyone else.

***

The traffic stretched through the night, packed without an inch to spare. The sun dawned gray and stormy, black clouds casting shadows on the cars packed bumper-to-bumper.

Tina had not cried. She had not cried a tear. She was numb. She did not think of Carl, his face at her wedding, him wearing a Santa Claus hat in their silly Christmas photos, him kissing her, the smell of his shirt. She did not think of any of these things. She thought about escaping, and making sure her family was safe.

Midday broke the horizon and the traffic was starting to thin out. Her car was sputtering, and she prayed she wasn't running out of gas.

She heard a scream from her right-hand side. One of those things--infectees, she thought--was pulling a woman out of the car, and she screamed as it tore into her arm and began to rip into the bone. Tina gunned the engine, but the traffic was still too thick, and another thing lurched from the side and clawed at the window of a station wagon. One car crashed into another and flipped it over.

Screams were beginning to echo all around.

Then they were everywhere. The flat prairie heralded dozens--no, more than that--crawling, staggering towards them, flooding the highway, and people were being pulled through broken windows, people were jumping out of their cars to run like terrified rabbits, and they were all packed so close none of them could do anything, and a teenage boy was being swarmed, his guts torn out and head cracked like a broken egg, and people were running and screaming and--

Then Tina saw her.

She was a girl, maybe college age, in jean shorts and a university sweatshirt. Her hair was wild and blonde, shoulder-length, and she stood in the middle of the chaos, mouth open, face in shock and tears streaming down her face.

Tina knew she had seconds to live.

She pushed her door open and screamed at her. "Get in! Get in! QUICKLY!"

The girl noticed her, and their eyes met, and at the same time as the things noticed her, the girl ran, legs pumping and hair streaming and knapsack flinging around as the things started towards her and Tina's open door, and as soon as the girl reached the car door a thing clawed at her back, and by the time she slammed the door shut and locked it, it slammed its bloody arms against the window and pressed its lacerated face against it, leaving blood and the imprint of teeth as Tina sped away.

There were cars stopped, cars toppled over, cars on fire and no one was obeying traffic laws, they were getting out of there, and Tina drove and dodged and fender-bendered her way into a short stretch of empty highway, then took the first rural side road she could, through a stretch of skeletal trees, and she drove, she drove, she drove until the screams and beeps and crashes were far behind her.

Tina looked beside her, at the crying girl. Her sweatshirt was stained and her hair was ratty. Her chest heaved in big, disbelieving sobs.

"What's your name?" Asked Tina.

The girl looked at her through thick glasses, her green eyes wide and disbelieving.

"Paloma," she said.

***

They drove until they found a rural gas station, cars crowding the parking lot. The inside was packed with terrified, nervy people, and they almost rioted when Tina came in and told them what she had seen.

"We have to get out of here," Tina said urgently, loading up on snacks and bottles of water. "The government can't do anything. We're on our own. Get away, get as far away as you can!"

"But what about my father?" Cried a woman with a brown perm. "He's back in Indianapolis, he's in a wheelchair, he needs his insulin--"

Tina closed her eyes once, hearing her heart beat, thinking of her own father. "Don't risk it," she said. "Listen--if he's not dead, he soon will be. We're all on our own. Save yourselves."

As she left, a man followed her outside. "Let me come with you," he pleaded. He was thin, pinched, with scruffy sideburns and a camouflage cap. "I was out hunting when I got the news. I can help you. We need to stick together--I have guns."

And that was how Axel joined them.

***

After Axel came, then came Trent. Then Michelle, Haylee, Kianna, Kyle.

Axel was long gone--taken by surprise while raiding a pharmacy. As he writhed on the ground, the infection spreading through his body, Michelle had put one bullet in his head to put him out of his misery. Two weeks later, she put the same gun in her mouth and blew her head off.

Haylee had split with them on the Ohio border, said she had family there she needed to find. Tina held out no hope she would ever see her again. Trent had been gotten while foraging for food--he had been attacked by a group of infectees, holding them off in a bathroom stall until he ran out of bullets. And then, Kianna.

Now it was her, Kyle and Paloma, holed up in an abandoned prairie city, in a rickety Victorian house that leaked.

Kyle slept like a rock, so the claps of thunder and downpouring rain barely made him mumble in his sleep. But Tina couldn't sleep, couldn't stop thinking as she curled up next to Paloma in her sleeping bag.

There was no television. Nothing was broadcasting. She had tried--static. Only some echoing old transmissions and looping songs. In fact, they had not seen a human being in weeks, or--

Had it been a month?

The rain was letting up. Paloma had finally fallen asleep, and her deep breaths soothed her. Tina let her head drop down.

What are we going to do? She wondered, not for the first time. How are we going to survive? Hopping from town to town, scavenging to survive? Sleeping with one eye open for zombies?

In the ceiling window, Tina saw clear raindrops drip down the glass, worming their way down the pane. Beyond it, she saw the vast night sky, scattered with hundreds of dimming stars. She had never noticed how beautiful the night sky was before the electricity had all gone out. She had been too wrapped up in her own problems, too focused on the lights surrounding her, not the light above her. She wondered whether it was God's punishment, to send the infected undead down to ravage the earth and destroy man's civilization. Man grew too proud, and so God struck him down.

In the reflection of the window, she saw her auburn hair spread over the rotten floorboards. It had gotten so much longer from the bob cut she was used to keeping it in--it was a tangled mane now. Her freckles stood out wanly from her face, and her hazel eyes were sunken and hollow. She looked like another person entirely.

Can we settle somewhere? Should we settle somewhere? Shall we go on to Kentucky? We can shelter in the mountains. But then what about winter? What if we run out of food?

Tina had never been this much of a worrywort. But as the oldest person there, she supposed she had to be. Kyle and Paloma were just kids. At least Paloma was--Kyle had just graduated college and was in the Army Reserve, while Paloma was in her second year for an American Literature degree. She was studying Thoreau and Bierce--but bashfully admitted to Tina that she liked Twilight and Anne Rice.

Just kids, Tina thought sadly. Their whole life, thrown away.

***

The three moved out the next morning. Kyle was the first up--he slept like a log but woke like he was still in boot camp. Armed with guns, baseball bats, tire irons, whatever they could get their hands on--they moved down the sidewalk in a group, every single member moving like the limb of one body, sticking close together.

The town they were in was eerie, and would have been even if there hadn't been an apocalypse. It had perhaps been well-to-do at one point--before the apocalypse, perhaps before the Great Depression. Houses with candy-floss edging, wraparound porches, and fenced backyards. Several had turrets. It was a boomtown--boomed a long while ago, when money flooded in, and then the dregs of people who were left were eventually annihilated by the zombies, leaving an empty, decaying town of grand houses with overgrown lawns. They passed a cemetery choked by weeds and tall grass, and the smashed-in storefront of a grocery store.

Something lurched out from the inside of a garage. They had plenty of warning, so they didn't need to waste bullets. Tina stepped forward and smashed its head in with her baseball bat. The first time she killed a zombie it had been jarring, upsetting--this was human being--but she had gotten used to it. They weren't human beings--at least, not anymore.

The city was oddly quiet. They were exiting the neighborhood and entering a stretch of abandoned shops with busted windows and apartment buildings. Perhaps they could search them for supplies.

Tina was nervy. She hated feeling that way--but nowadays, being on edge could save your life. She was expecting to see more zombies, but the potholed street in front of them was empty. Crumbs of glass crunched under her sneakers.

They were on high alert until a voice barked out, "Drop your weapons!"

The sound of a new human voice--a sound they hadn't heard in weeks? Months? Froze them. Paloma pulled in a gasp from beside her.

The voice was of a man--a gruff man. Coming from somewhere ahead-- the blank brick apartments maybe, or the house a little to its left--

A bullet buried itself in the STOP sign beside them. "DROP YOUR WEAPONS!"

The three slowly dropped their weapons, and as they straightened up. A door was kicked open from the brick apartment buildings. A brawny, blond man holding a rifle.

"Why the hell are you acting like this, man?" Yelled Kyle as he collected their weapons. "We ain't fuckin zombies!"

The blond man glared at him. He was built powerfully, with long, thick straw-colored hair, a strong jaw and close-set blue eyes. There was a coldness to those eyes she did not like--and Tina abruptly wondered if her own eyes had that same coldness as well.

His gaze moved to Tina and Paloma, and lingered on them for far too long. "Inside."

The three of them wordlessly moved inside, where they were greeted by a slim young man with dark curly hair and pouchy eyes. "How long have you been out here?" He said, grinning. He had a gap in his front teeth.

Tina shrugged. "Can't tell. Couldn't keep track of it... too long fighting. Scrounging."

"Met anyone before?"

"No... only a few, solitaries, you know, who joined us... lots of them aren't here anymore."

The man flashed another smile that seemed too big for his face. "Good."

Good?

There were other men in the room--and only men. Some wild-eyed, some calmer, some with longer hair, some with shorter. All were rugged and wary. They stared at Paloma and Tina, dozens of eyes boring into them with disturbing intensity.

Her neck was beginning to prickle with discontent. "So how long have you been out here?"

One of them turned and left without a word. The man with curly dark hair said, "A long time."

"Come on back," said a rawboned red-haired man. "We have food. My God, it's good to see... other people."

"You certainly weren't acting like it," said Kyle acidly, and Tina kicked him.

***

Tina spread peanut butter over a slice of bread. Paloma stuck close to her. "Are we gonna stay with these men?" She murmured, eyes nervously glancing around the kitchen.

The kitchen was in semi-good condition. But it was stripped bare. They were still in need of supplies, and badly. But at least they had actual food now. Tina was becoming tired of eating cold baked beans out of a can.

"I don't know," Tina confessed. "We should. With them we have strength in numbers. But..."

"They creep me out," muttered Tina. "I don't like the way they look at me."

Me neither. "We should stay with them for a little while, at least. Regain our strength." Tina handed her peanut butter sandwich to Paloma. "Here, Paloma. Eat. You're getting too skinny."

Another blond man came in, flanked by several other men. This one was slimmer, with shorter, sandier blond hair and a nose that looked as if it had been broken a few times. Kyle was talking furiously with him. "Don't see how you have to-- this is totally ridiculous, we need to--" Kyle looked furious, and his voice was rising.

"Listen," the man said abruptly to Kyle. "Let's speak outside." He cast a glance over to the women and smiled disarmingly before he turned back to Kyle. "Just by ourselves. There's some... things you need to know, just between us men."

"What things?" Protested Tina, hating that she was being left out. "You got something to say, say it to me too!" She had single-handedly took the reigns of their group. She made the decisions--she was the oldest one there. Why were they excluding her? Because she was a woman?