Love & Decay
A Novella Series
Episode One
From the Point of View of Hendrix Parker
By Rachel Higginson
[email protected] Rachel Higginson 2013
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To Zach,
This would not exist without you.
Just like so many other things.
And to Mandy,
Who loves Hendrix,
But might love Zombies more.
Chapter One
647 days after initial infection
One, two, three, four, five. One, two, three, four, five.
“You’re obsessing again,” Vaughan, my oldest brother and resident Confucius, noted dryly.
I grunted. Mostly because I didn’t want to admit that he was right. I was obsessing- counting my brothers and sister over and over, as if their numbers would change from one second to the other.
Only, the thing was…. they could change. In a heartbeat, another piece of my family could be ripped from me and then what?
I couldn’t- wouldn’t- let that happen ever again.
And there were just so many of them. How could I keep them all safe? How could I even begin to fathom how to keep them all alive? There were too many that needed my protection; too many important lives that could not fall to the greedy hands that would take them.
Nelson, the carefree but responsibly low-key one of the family dropped off a couple bottles of water for Vaughan and me before scooping up Page and walking her into the kitchen where they would start throwing something together for our dinner.
I watched them with a feral possession that honestly scared me. I had never known responsibility like this before. I’d never believed a weight this heavy would be put on my shoulders or gifts so precious and costly could be given to me to protect and keep safe. I didn’t have to go at it alone, we all shared this duty together. But that didn’t lessen the obligation in any way or take any pressure off my shoulders. I felt pulled in every direction, strung tight with a task I was ill-prepared for and pathetically under qualified.
We’d survived almost two years now, getting by from the survival obsession my father had instilled in us and sheer luck and determination. For now we were safe, but how long would this last? We had already experienced more loss than we ever should have.
And I would never go through that again- I would never give up those I loved to this world and the evil creatures that haunted it again.
In another corner of the room, my younger brothers, Harrison and King, were having a free throw competition using a metal trashcan and crumpled up pieces of paper. They were laughing, acting like the immature idiots they were and ignoring the fact that we were trapped on the upper level of some hillbilly department store with a town of Feeders underneath us.
I watched them for a moment, entertained by their carefree spirits and jealous of the easy way they approached this circle of hell we’d been assigned. They adapted to this purgatory better than I had, or even Vaughan and Nelson. They were resilient to the upheaval, the abrupt change in our lifestyles and quality of living. They’d even bounced back from the death of our parents better than the rest of us. Part of that had to do with their personalities, I knew that. But the other part stemmed from their age. We allowed them to be the teenagers they were, struggling to keep the heaviness of responsibility from them. Sure, we asked more of them than anybody should, but only because we had to, we had no other choice. And we only demanded the bare minimum of what we could survive with.
Then there was Page. Our eight year old sister, so purely innocent and youthfully naïve, she was like the lone diamond in a mine full of coal. She was our saving grace, our pilgrimage to Mecca, she was the reason we fought, killed, survived. And she brought us light. In this world there seemed to only be darkness. When I knew I would drown in it, be pulled to the depths of an endless abyss, she shone bright enough for me to remember my path, she lit up my life until I could see the way again.
I opened a bottle of water and took a healthy pull. It was important to stay hydrated and nourished. We had the resources now, so we were obligated to use them. And when we needed to, we would find more. We were mentally and skillfully equipped to survive the basic elements after the fall of civilization; it was the other factors- the roaming undead and demoralization of mankind- that made me fear for our longevity.
“Hendrix,” Vaughan bit out in a low voice that made me think he had been trying to get my attention for a while.
I half turned to him, keeping my hawk eyes on my little sister. She was sitting on the counter, laughing at Nelson while he tossed crackers in the air and caught them in his mouth. “Yeah?”
“I’ve been trying to talk to you for the last five minutes. Where’d you go?”
I turned to him fully, meeting his wise eyes. I met him steadily, conveying the path of my thoughts without saying them out loud.
There was a time in my life when we weren’t this open with each other, when we had thoughts and plans we kept from each other. We were brothers after all and had always shared a competiveness that could be dangerous at times. But that was a luxury left behind in a different life.
As the oldests in our family, the responsibility of keeping everyone together and alive fell to us. We had to keep communication open and honest or this family unit would implode. We were together constantly, without any break from each other or individual privacy. We had to make it work, we had to work hard for it to work, or the consequences were unthinkable.
But we also couldn’t speak openly in front of the younger kids. So we’d learned to do a lot of our talking silently, almost telepathically.
It worked- although sometimes it made me feel like a freak of nature.
Vaughan nodded once he’d seen the gravity in my expression and let out an exasperated sigh. He looked like our dad just then, his eyes wrinkled heavily in the corners, his blondish hair seemed to gray while I watched and his mouth pulled into a tight frown. He felt this burden stronger than I did. But it was his own fault. I didn’t give myself the option of failure so my pressure laid in the realm of only victory. Vaughan thought everything through- what it would be like to live another day, what it would be like to die today and what it would be like if each of the siblings, including me, were taken away. He wore leadership, responsibility and grief like badges tattooed on his skin.
And that was hard for him. I was naturally an asshole, I knew that. I was born naturally pissed off. Vaughan had never taken anything seriously, not even at college. He had it easy most of his life, just naturally good at everything he touched. He didn’t have to work hard to succeed and because of that he’d almost forgotten how to work hard.
Now things were different.
Now, he held us together by his tenacity and quick-thinking. I knew I was just as essential to our survival as Vaughan, but the rest of my siblings looked to him as their leader and saw me as more of the muscle.
And I was Ok with that.
That meant they trusted me with their lives, and that was all I needed from them to keep them safe.
V
aughan cut into my thoughts again, “I was asking how long you thought we should stay here? I know we have a good set up, I just worry about getting too comfortable. We need to stay vigilant.”
“Vigilant,” I agreed. “But don’t they also need some kind of stability?”
“Yes, dear.”
I snapped my neck so I faced him again. “You don’t think they do? Page can’t even read, Vaughan. I’m not saying we set up with a settlement. I’m just saying, some consistency couldn’t hurt.”
He fell into thoughtful silence- a sure sign that I’d won that argument. Although there was no sense of victory when Vaughan and I argued over this stuff. We were doing what we had to in order to stay alive. The sense of competition and sick victory of turning the other into a loser had died probably around the same time humans started dying from infected, corpse-like recreations of other humans.
We just existed. We just made sure we kept existing. But that was it. Life had settled into a