“He’s not a waste of energy,” I said without conviction.
“They evacuated him first, and as far as I could tell, he is the only non-army person who got evacuated. ” Her anger was replaced by an honest accusation. “Why would they do that? I don’t know of any other person who was ever even in the sick ward. ” She paused. “I don’t think he’s real. ”
I felt the shift in the room. Everyone had been looking at Harlow like she was the crazy person when she started yelling, but now they all stared expectantly at me.
Panic rolled over me. Even though I knew I could trust them, I didn’t want to tell them the truth. I was afraid of what it could mean for my brother and me. But it didn’t look like I had a choice anymore.
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“He’s real,” I said quietly. “He’s just… he’s not sick. He’s the opposite of sick. ”
“What does that mean?” Lazlo asked, and at least he didn’t sound angry. Just confused.
“It means…” I took a deep breath. “He’s immune. ”
“What?” Lazlo asked.
“Immune? To the virus?” Blue looked dubious. I bit my lip and nodded.
“Wait. Does that mean you’re immune?” Lazlo asked hopefully.
“No. I don’t know. ” I leaned back against the counter.
“But how do you know he is?” Blue asked.
“He was bitten. ”
“He was bitten?” Blue raised an eyebrow, still uncertain about my story. “Are you sure it was by a zombie?”
“Yeah, I know a zombie when I see one. ” I met his skeptical gaze evenly. “We were in Des Moines looking for food or survivors. Five zombies ambushed us. One of them got Max really good in the leg. It was so bad that I wasn’t sure he’d live long enough for the virus to take effect. ”
Max had been behind me when the zombies attacked. I told him to go hide, but he grabbed a stick and beat on one that came at my back. I heard Max scream, and when I turned around, the zombie was gnawing on his leg.
“Then what happened?” Lazlo prompted me when I lapsed into a silence.
“I, uh, bandaged his leg. I knew what it meant, but I had to do something. I knew that he had to be infected, but he didn’t know. He was just a little kid, and we’d been through so much. I wasn’t gonna give up on him. ”
“And he didn’t turn? He never got sick? At all?” Blue asked.
“No. The leg hurt like hell. I broke into a pharmacy and stole antibiotics and First Aid. I got food, and we had a gun,” I said. “I found an abandoned house and locked us in the attic, and I waited for him to show any signs. ”
For seven days, I sat up in the attic with my little brother. I fed him, took care of his leg, talked to him, played games with him. And I never slept. I couldn’t.
I kept the loaded gun in the back of my pants, and I never let him find out. My plan was to kill him as soon as he started turning into a zombie, and then kill myself. For seven excruciating days, I waited for us both to die.
“But he never did. ” I shook my head. “I was too afraid to leave. I might have stayed up there forever with Max, but soldiers came in, looking for survivors to quarantine. ”
Beck had been the one to find us, and at the thought of him, I felt fresh guilt. We had never really been together, not in any sense of the word, but he hadn’t been gone for very long. Kissing Lazlo felt like a betrayal to Beck’s memory, and I moved farther away from Lazlo.
Beck was the first person I had told about Max possibly being infected. Other soldiers would’ve left us to die or killed us themselves, but Beck believed me.
At the quarantine, he took Max to the doctors and scientists, who were trying to find a cure or a vaccine for the virus. Beck looked out for both of us, making sure that the doctors didn’t reduce Max to a glorified lab rat, and training me so I would be able to defend us.
“So they know?” Blue asked, drawing me back from my thoughts. “The doctors, they know he’s immune and that’s why they’re keeping him safe?”
“Yeah,” I nodded.
“Why are you so worried?” Harlow asked. “Max is obviously a top priority for them. That’s why they evacuated him first. Why do you need to get him so badly?”
“He almost died on my watch, and I swore that if he lived, I would do everything to protect him,” I said fiercely. “And I can’t live up to that if I’m not with him. I need to be there, and I need to be sure. ”
“I can buy all that but… why did you keep this a secret?” Lazlo asked, sounding almost hurt.
“Because. Telling people your brother might be the cure to the worst epidemic known to humanity sounds insane. Or worse. The wrong kind of people would do anything to get their hands on somebody like Max. ” I looked up at them. “I’m trusting you that this won’t go any further. ”
“Who are we gonna tell?” Harlow rolled her eyes.
“Come on,” Blue said, apparently done with the conversation. “We should get back on the road. London made the quarantine sound like it wasn’t too far from here, and I’d like to make it there by tomorrow. ”
Lazlo tried to walk with me out to the car, but I made a point of keeping a step ahead of him. I sat in the front seat next to Blue, and Harlow sat in back with Lazlo.
A definite tension was in the car when we started on the road, and that didn’t help the situation any. This is why I always tried to travel alone. Getting involved with other people never helped anything.
I offered to take over driving as the sun started set, but Blue gave one derisive look at my arm and said no. It hurt, but it was the smart thing to do. If I ended up going rabid, it would be better if I weren’t behind the wheel when it happened.
I still didn’t have any symptoms, but that didn’t mean anything. I had seen enough infected people to know that sometimes, it just happened. They were fine, then they’d start vomiting, and then they were crazed monsters trying to tear out my throat.
Lazlo ended up driving, and I moved to the backseat so Blue could have shotgun. I thought it would be better to give Lazlo some space. I had no idea how I felt about the kiss earlier, but I knew that I didn’t want to complicate things any more than I already had. And I didn’t want to hurt Harlow anymore, either.
By the time nightfall settled in, Blue attempted a nap, resting his head against the window of the car door, and Harlow chatted with Lazlo about anything.
Her main interest seemed to be Lazlo’s music career, which he seemed uncomfortable talking about. When we had first met, he been nearly bragging about it, but now he didn’t even want to mention it.
“So you had your own signature bass?” She leaned forward, resting her arms on the back of the seat so she could talk to him. “What does that mean?”
“It just means that I designed a line of basses for a company. ” Lazlo shifted, and he looked at me in the rearview mirror. “What about you, Remy? Did you ever play an instrument?”
“I’m sure she did,” Harlow replied dryly, sitting back in the seat. “She can do anything. ”
“You know, you can’t be mad at me forever,” I told her.
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“Yeah. I can. ” She crossed her arms and stared straight ahead.
“I won’t be around forever,” I said gently.
She looked at me from the corner of her eye, unwilling to turn her head completely. Her eyes rested on the scratch on my arm, and almost reluctantly, she caved. Her entire body relaxed, her arms dropped to her sides, and she looked at me sadly.
“I was never mad at you,” she said like she had no idea what I was talking about.
“Good. ”
“Now that that’s out of the way, anyone wanna play a game of ‘I Spy’ with me?” Lazlo asked. Since he hated the game, I assumed he suggested it to further appease Harlow.
“It’s too dark to play. ” Harlow looked out her window at the black landscape. Without any electricity, the only lights on the ro
ad came from our car. The stars shone brightly, but the moon only had a thin crescent to give off light.
“Nonsense. There’s gotta be stuff we can see. ” Lazlo searched the road, determined to prove her wrong.
“What about that?” Harlow pointed to the front windshield.
On the road a ways in front of us, the headlights glinted off something shiny. The closer we got, the more things glinted. Small flashes of light all across the road, reminding me of lightening bugs, but the glimmer had something menacing about it.
“What the hell is that?” Lazlo leaned forward, slowing the car down.
We drove near enough where the headlights hit more than their eyes, and we could see them lurching forward. They weren’t at their usual manic speed, but they were definitely a small legion of zombies. They stood there or stumbled ahead slowly, their arms hanging disjointed, their faces clawed and drooling. Some of them looked dismembered, and all of them were old and in terrible shape.
“Holy shit!” Lazlo slammed on the breaks.
“What’s going on?” Blue snapped awake, and Ripley growled in the back.
“Zombies are blocking the road!” Lazlo gestured to the pack in front of us. “What do I do?”
We sat in the middle of the road in an elderly station wagon with two guns and a lion, and I didn’t know how much ammo we had left. I might already be infected with the virus, and none of us knew exactly how close or how far we were from the quarantine. An army of half-dead monsters trudged towards us, and we had to make a decision.
“Run the fuckers over,” Harlow said, and none of us disagreed with her.
Lazlo pressed on the gas, and the car surged forward, as fast as this car could surge. It plowed into the zombies, and it gave me a twisted satisfaction at watching them splat on the hood on the car. Harlow actually squealed.
The car mowed down a few of them initially, but running into bodies took a toll on it. And then the zombies started pushing back. Too late, we realized the zombies were at lot stronger and faster than they pretended to be. They had faked us out.
We weren’t moving forward at all. They rocked the car from side to side, trying to tip us, and I remembered the truck where we found Ripley. The zombies had flipped it, and here we were, in the exact same situation. And I knew how well it turned out for the people in the truck.
Harlow screamed, and Lazlo shouted for everyone to hang on, although I’m not sure how that would help. Blue told me to get the guns, but I was already on it, climbing into the back with a very pissed off lion. She slammed her paws into the windows, trying to get at the zombies taunting her from the other side, and I prayed she didn’t break the glass. I did not need her letting zombies in here.
I got the shotgun and passed it forward to Blue, but I couldn’t find the handgun. Harlow had it last, and I had no idea what she’d done with it. Crawling on my hands and knees in the back, I searched through the bags, and narrowly missed being swiped by Ripley’s giant paws. She didn’t want to hurt me, but I was in the way of her attempted zombie murder.
Lazlo shouted things I didn’t understand, and the car started doing more than just rock back and forth. It was full on tipping.
I tried to grab onto something to hang onto, but it happened so fast. One second, I was on my knees, the next I was tumbling head over feet over lion.
I heard things shattering and metal crunching and people screaming, but I hit my head and everything became very disorienting.
Ripley leapt over me, her chain smacking painfully into my stomach, and then she was gone. I heard her roaring and felt a greasy hand grabbing onto my arm. I sat up, yanking my arm from a zombie grip.
When the car flipped over, the back window broke out. Shattered glass was strewn about with the bags, and zombies were starting to creep in the back.
Ripley rushed out to get them, and she held off a few, but there were too many for just her. There were too many for us.
The zombie that grabbed my arm kept coming after me. I picked up a giant shard of broken glass and stabbed it into its throat, and the zombie finally stopped. But another one was right on its heels.
“Remy!” Lazlo yelled. Blood trailed down his forehead, but he was sitting up and held his hand out to me.
Only the back window had been broken out, so in the front, they were safe. Blue tried to aim the gun at the zombies coming at me, but I was in the way. Harlow had crouched down, covering her head with her hands, but otherwise, everyone looked okay.
A zombie came at me, and I kicked in its face. It squished in, leaving a gooey mess all over the bottom of my shoe. I scooted backwards on my butt, mindful of the broken glass, but getting away from the window as quickly as possible.
Once I was out of the way, Blue shot the zombies. After he blew one of their heads off, they came in a lot more slowly. Outside, I could hear their death groans and Ripley’s roars as she took them on. I hoped she didn’t get hurt, but at this point, I voted her most likely to survive out of all of us.
“Are you okay?” Lazlo knelt right behind me.
“Yeah. ” I looked over at Blue, who fired on another intruder. “I couldn’t find the handgun. ”
“I don’t think it’s gonna matter all that much. ” Blue gave me a sidelong glance, and he’d come to the same conclusion I had. We were completely overwhelmed.
The zombies pounded on the side of the car, the sounds echoing through the small space like thunder. That was interrupted by shattering glass, and I covered my face.
Before I could tell where they had gotten in, Harlow screamed. I looked up to see her being dragged out through the broken window, her fingers desperately raking on the felt ceiling of the car.
– 15 –
I went out the window after her. Glass from the broken window scraped my knees, and a long piece slashed across my stomach, but I barely noticed it. Harlow’s plaintive cries blocked out everything else.
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As I crawled out of the car, a zombie greeted me. One of its ears had been bitten off, and its jaw hung by a piece of skin. It did some weird screechy howl thing right in my face, its breath smelling of death and rotten meat.
To shut it up, I punched it in the face. The skin gave way, and its head snapped back. It didn’t kill it, but it gave me a chance to slip by.
A hairy monstrous beast of a zombie had grabbed onto Harlow’s ankles and pulled her out of the car, presumably so it would be easier to eat her. She rolled onto her back and kicked at his face as hard as she could, and I finally saw the appeal of her combat boots.
Two more zombies came at her, rushing to the sound of her cries, but Ripley dove over her, tearing into one of them. The other one kept coming, and I had to get to it.
The zombie with one ear tried to come at me again, so I punched it even harder, aiming my fist on the soft skin of its cheekbone. It caved underneath my hand, covering my skin with disgusting gelatin that passed for zombie brains. Before I had a chance to vomit, I yanked my hand out and got to my feet.
Sprinting, I went for the zombie going at Harlow’s head. I tackled him in the back, slamming him onto the ground right next to where Harlow lay struggling. I knelt on his back, with his face smashed into the ground, and he wriggled and tried to get out from under me.
I had been hoping that he would be older, and his whole body would cave under my weight, but no such luck. I grabbed his head, my fingers pressing on his dry, patchy scalp, and I twisted it hard, snapping his neck with a sickening crack.
At least six and a half feet tall, the zombie attacking Harlow looked to be half a ton, not counting the grizzly dark hair running all down his arms and back and chest. On top of all that, he didn’t look that old. His skin hadn’t sagged or bloated. The only thing keeping Harlow alive was he was too stupid to think of a better plan than letting her kick him in the face, but eventually, he’d just snap her legs.
He was far too big for me to take do
wn on my own, and Blue was trapped in the car with the only gun, holding zombies off as long as he could. Ripley had taken down another zombie right next to us, and she ripped into the meaty part of its belly.
Ripley still had that chain tied around her neck, since I hadn’t trusted her to let me get close enough to take it off. It might finally come in handy, and I grabbed it.
Holding the chain in my hands, I jumped up and wrapped it around the monster zombie’s neck, choking him. He made a gurgling sound, and I literally hung off him by the chain. After a second, he let Harlow go and stumbled backwards.
The chain yanked on Ripley, and she growled in protest, then jumped at his face. He fell backwards, with me landing roughly underneath him, and Ripley began eating him.
Under the weight of them both, I couldn’t breathe or move. I was going to suffocate under a zombie.
I felt Harlow’s hand, soft and small on my wrist, trying to yank me out. With her pulling, I pushed myself out. I was almost all the way out, except for one of my legs, when Harlow had to let go to fight off a zombie.
Her defense was to squeal, grab a rock, and hit it in the head with it. While that wasn’t exactly how I’d do it, it worked, and the zombie collapsed to the ground. Harlow jumped back to avoid zombie blood, and I got myself the rest of the way out from under the beastly zombie. Ripley looked at me, licked her lips, and ran off to kill something else.
I could hear the gun blasts from the car, and Lazlo yelled something unintelligible. Most of the zombies seemed to be swarming around the station wagon, but they were catching onto the fact that we were here too. A few of them lurched towards us, and I didn’t even have time to catch my breath. Without any weapons, my best bet for survival was preempting their attacks.
We watched as they did that hideous jerky walk. In later stages of the virus, they moved as if they were always on the brink of an epileptic fit.
“We’re gonna die,” Harlow whispered.
“Not yet,” I said.
I rushed for a weaker looking one first. They were generally easier to take down. I punched it in the face, and it stumbled backwards. I wanted it on the ground, though, so I kicked it in the stomach, and that made it fall. I stomped on its head, which gave easily under my foot.
Needing a weapon, I had to be resourceful. I grabbed the zombie’s leg and bent it up at the knee, going against the joint. The bones were weakened, and it snapped quickly. I yanked it off, and finally, I had something to fight with. A leg, from the knee down.
Harlow hadn’t moved, and I stood in front of her. Ripley continued taking out as many zombies as she could, and I didn’t know how things were fairing for Blue and Lazlo. And truthfully, I didn’t want to know. I couldn’t think about them.
My only thought had to be surviving this second, because if I thought of anything past that, I’d realize how futile it was and simply give up.