Until the End of the World (Book 1)

  John teams up with Peter outside and sends James and me into Health and Beauty. Nelly and Penny will head to Clothing, since digging really does a number on one’s wardrobe. Ana stands just inside, so she can help where needed.

  We switch on headlamps and flashlights as we duck through the door. The cash register lanes stretch out, dark and vacant. They already look foreign, like some relic of an ancient world. It’s quiet and feels empty, in the way that no hairs stand up on the back of my neck. But it smells awful. Something in here is very, very dead. In any other situation that would be reassuring.

  We creep farther in. The wide front aisle of the store is in shambles. Boxes of crackers and cereal litter the floor, intermixed with clothes and liquids that have hardened to a brown gel. Penny and Nelly head to the back, crunching on Triscuits and Cheerios. Ana’s dark eyes are perfect circles, and her face is pale. She’s within eye- and earshot of John, but she’s the only one who’s alone. She holds her gun in her hand, and her finger tends toward the trigger.

  “Ana, watch your finger,” I warn. “One yell and we’ll be back in ten seconds for you, I promise. It’s clear right here. You’ll be okay.”

  She moves her finger, the whites of her eyes shining in the gloom, and nods. “Just hurry up.” I’m about to say something reassuring when she continues. “I want my turn to get what I need.”

  I motion to James and turn away before sighing. “Let’s go.”

  We turn down the main aisle and try to keep our crunching to a minimum. It sounds so loud in the silence. I never realized how much noise there was in the world until it was gone. The metal gates at the pharmacy are bent and twisted. The bottles lay in jumbles and heaps. Entire shelves are bare.

  “Bet all the good stuff’s gone,” James whispers as we walk past.

  My jeans stick to my legs with sweat, even though it’s not so stuffy in here. My heart beats so loud that I’m almost surprised James hasn’t remarked upon it.

  I fill the bag slung over my shoulder with latex gloves and assorted supplies while James keeps watch. The decayed smell is worse here, and there are huge dark patches of gunk on the floor. I’m pretty sure they’re the color of dried blood, but they look black-brown in the headlamps, whose LED glare makes everything look like a black and white movie.

  It looks like Hershey’s Syrup; that’s what they used to use for blood in old horror films. That must have been one hell of a food fight. I raise my hand to my mouth to stifle the insane laugh that bubbles up.

  James looks at me curiously. “What’s funny?”

  “Absolutely nothing,” I say, truthfully. “It’s just getting to me.”

  “It reeks. It’s even worse over here.” He holds his earpiece. “Let’s go see about the automotive section. John says all’s still clear but to hurry up.”

  There’s a room that leads to the Garden Center on our left, where they put the seasonal merchandise. The stench here is solid; it fills my mouth and coats my skin with a layer of slime. We gag and breathe through our mouths. But now I can taste it, which is far worse than smelling it. I lean on a shelf and retch, but nothing comes out. When I raise my head, my headlamp illuminates the area.

  “Jesus,” breathes James.

  There must be forty corpses piled there, arms and legs splayed and tangled together, so we can’t tell where one ends and another begins. We inch closer, ready to run at any movement. When James clicks on his big flashlight, we see gray skin and open unhealed wounds. Every last body has a head wound; someone has killed all of the Lexers in the store.

  “Jesus,” James repeats, and then speaks into the radio. “Someone’s killed all the infected. We’ve got a pileup by the Garden Center. We’re heading for Automotive. Five minutes, tops.”

  I’m grateful that someone has done this. I feel tremendous relief that other people are out here fighting, surviving. I wish they were here right now. I notice two bodies set apart and motion for the flashlight.

  Two girls, both no more than eighteen, are half-propped against the shelves. One wears only a ripped and stained tank top, the other still has on a jacket. They don’t have that gray, coagulated look the other bodies have.

  Their thighs and faces are bruised and swollen, but I can tell they haven’t been dead very long. I wonder if they were infected, recently bitten, but I dismiss that thought immediately. One sits on a carpet of blood, shot through the chest, not the head. The other girl appears to have been strangled with the rope that’s still knotted around her neck. And they’re the only ones with flies circling and landing on them like some sort of insect airport. Suddenly, I’m very thankful that whoever killed these infected isn’t here, because they must have done this, too.

  I want to drag them somewhere, away from the pile of infected. Cover their naked bodies and preserve some of their dignity. But there’s no time to do things like that now. A little flame of anger flares in my belly and spreads. They survived this far, only to be raped and murdered by some inhuman son of a bitch. Like we haven’t got enough inhumanity running around.

  “C’mon.” James tugs my sleeve. “Nel and Penny are done. They’re waiting for us.”

  We find driving gloves in the automotive section and head out. Ana, Penny and Nelly wait for us at the hole in the glass, their bags full. I gulp in the fresh air outside and fish around in my pocket for something, anything, to get the taste out of my mouth. I find lint-covered peppermint Life Savers and Adrian’s ring. I give the ring a rub and pop a candy in my mouth, offering one to James, who looks like he needs it as badly as I do. He accepts it gratefully and spits out the swig of water he was swishing around.

  John’s gotten the gist of what we saw, and he wastes no time. “Everyone in the trucks, let’s go.”

  His eyes haven’t stopped moving and his mouth is tight. We head back onto the road. At the crest of the hill, I turn back and see a beat-up red van and a sports car pulling into the Wal-Mart parking lot.

  “That might be them,” I say, shaking at how close we came to being confronted with people who rape and kill young girls.

  “I had a feeling,” John says.

  CHAPTER 66

  “Ana actually had the nerve to complain that everybody but her ‘got something’ at the store. Like we all got perfume and boxes of candy and she got nothing,” Penny says. She looks up from where she’s cutting pieces out of my mom’s leather coat on the back deck and makes a face.

  “Your sister…” I leave the rest unsaid.

  “I know, I know. I’ve tried to talk to her. She’s being so obstinate. My mom always said Ana’s picture would be next to obstinate in the dictionary.”

  I can think of a few other words Ana’s picture might be next to.

  Penny sees my face and cracks up. “Yes, obstinate doesn’t begin to cover it. I don’t know what to do. Sometimes I can’t blame her. This whole thing is terrifying and surreal. But as an excuse, I think that’s stretched pretty thin. We all have to do our part, you know?”

  “Yeah.” I thread the needle of the sewing machine on the table. “I don’t know, Pen. You know, Ana’s like my little sister, or was, when she would actually say more than two words to me. But she and Peter have formed their own little clique of denial or something.”

  I put strips of elastic and leather under the machine needle and spin the knob on the side with my hand. It’s not as fast as a real foot treadle, but it does the job of sewing neater, stronger and faster than I can without electricity.

  “So what exactly are we making, anyway?” Penny asks.

  “Kind of like armor. I’m attaching it to the gloves. It’ll strap over our arms to protect us from scratches or bites. It should protect us from infected blood. Lexers have regular teeth like us. They can’t rip through leather.”

  I think of the horror I felt after I killed that one with the machete, how afraid I was that the virus had made its way into my bloodstream. I’m not usually obsessed with germs, but I’ve got a raging case of OCD about this.

&nb
sp; “Okay. This is one of those surreal moments I was just talking about. I’m sitting in the sunshine in the woods making zombie armor.”

  James steps through the sliding glass doors to the deck. “Don’t you know you aren’t supposed to call them zombies?” He wags a finger at her. “Every book or movie or whatever, they always call them something else.”

  “You know,” I say, “preppers used to call the people who weren’t prepared zombies, too. The people who would want your supplies after everything went south. But you’re right, they never say zombies. Weird.”

  Seeing those girls at Wal-Mart made it clear that there really are two types of zombies to fear.

  “We call them something else, too,” Penny says. “What have we got? Lexers, Biters, Walkers, Infected, Undead, Creepers, Stumblers, Zeds. I’m sure there’s others we haven’t heard or thought of yet. Plus, unfortunately, this is not a movie.”

  “Too true,” he says, then sits and stretches out his long legs. He’s filled out a little bit from the work around here, and his face has changed from pasty to ivory, but he’ll always be a string bean.

  He rubs the leather on the table between his fingers. “Armor, huh? It’s a good idea. We don’t know how contagious it is. If it can be transmitted by just a scratch, then we need to be scratch-proof. Full-length leather gloves, or how about neoprene gloves? They’d be great.”

  “Tell me about it,” I say. “But where does one buy neoprene gloves in upstate New York? If we happen upon a sporting goods store, we have to go in and check.” I look up from the sewing machine. “I have to say, I’m pretty disappointed my parents didn’t stock up on them. How could they not have planned for this exact contingency?”

  “Everyone should be ready for the zombie apocalypse.” James smiles at Penny as he says the word. “And neoprene gloves are an absolute must. At the very least the oceans could have risen until you had oceanfront property and needed them for surfing.”

  “Two very, very real possibilities,” Penny jokes. “Well, actually, I guess only one is still far-fetched. Like I said, it’s surreal. My brain can’t even keep up.”

  I pull the first finished glove on and make sure the elastic is snug. The long strips of leather attach to the glove at my wrist and rise up to my elbow. They’ll be hot to wear, but I can move just fine. I practice drawing my revolver out of my holster and point it into the woods.

  “Hey,” James says. “They’re actually pretty bad-ass. You look like a superhero. I totally want to play with my pair.”

  I put my hands on my hips and gaze into the distance, superhero style. “Farmer by day, zombie-killer by night.” I point my gloved finger at him. “I’ll make yours next.”

  “Cool.”

  Penny hands him the paper pattern and leather. “Here, papi, make yourself useful.”

  “Si, mami,” he says in the whitest Spanish accent imaginable.

  Penny and I laugh, and he picks up a pair of scissors and starts to cut, mouth quirking. James’s picture should be next to useful in the dictionary.

  CHAPTER 67

  I’ve finished making everyone their armor, and we’re heading out to practice shooting with it on. A jungle of plants sits on the deck and porch. The tiny seedlings are fast becoming food that will go in the ground in a day or two. Right now they’re getting used to the outside air during the day, so they’ll be strong enough to live outside full time. Ana sets down the watering can and heads to the truck. I think she doesn’t mind the garden work; I’m pretty sure I saw her talking to the plants one day, not that she’d ever cop to it.

  The screen door slams as Peter comes out onto the deck. He’s got on work boots and one of his two pairs of jeans that came with him from the city. They may have been insanely overpriced, but I have to say they’ve held up well; my cheaper jeans have aged three years. Maybe that can be a selling point if the world ever goes back to the way it was. They can think up some sort of post-apocalyptic tagline for their four hundred dollar jeans.

  There’s something I don’t miss: being inundated with advertisements designed to make you want more, to never be satisfied. Not that I want it this way, either. But there’s a part of me that loves this life; it’s what I always wanted. I love being in the woods, growing food, making the things we need instead of buying them. I just wish the things we needed weren’t sharpened machetes and zombie armor.

  Peter avoids my eyes as he comes down the steps. His hair’s gotten longer and he’s scruffier, but it suits him. He was always too smooth, too groomed. He checks his holster and hooks his fingers under his rifle strap.

  We were never soul mates, but we could have fun together. Sometimes, like that night we met, we really talked. Once, after a few too many drinks, he complained about having to go to some fancy party filled with fake people. The society pages would be full of the pictures. I remember when he told me that there were still society pages; I thought they had died out sometime around the end of prohibition. I wouldn’t believe him until he showed me, and then I had laughed my ass off at the names and captions, while he watched me with a half smile and glinting eyes.

  “So don’t go. Come to my house and watch chick flicks,” I joked. “Why do you need to go?”

  He knew I wouldn’t go anywhere near this social engagement and had quit asking me weeks ago. His eyelids were at half mast, and his head rested on the back of his couch.

  “If you don’t make an appearance then they forget about you, Cassie,” he whispered. “You wouldn’t understand. I don’t want to be invisible.”

  When he closed his eyes he looked so vulnerable. I reached out and ran my finger over the spiky shadows his eyelashes made on his cheeks. “Peter, you are not forgettable. They don’t make you visible. I see you.”

  But he kept his eyes closed and his breathing became regular. I wasn’t sure if he had even heard. The next morning I sat crossed-legged on his couch with my cup of tea, while he sat in the big chair and looked out the floor-to-ceiling windows of his inherited pre-war apartment. I smiled at him, thinking maybe we had reached somewhere different the night before.

  “I can’t remember a thing about last night. I must have passed out,” he said, and glanced away quickly. But I thought I saw the lie in his eyes, the fear that he had said too much and was afraid I knew.

  “Oh, you fell asleep, and I got you into bed.” But I tried one more time. “Are you sure you have to go to that party tonight?”

  His face was casual, but his eyes were sad, maybe. It was hard to tell in the sunlight. “Yes, I have to go.”

  This Peter coming down the steps looks different but acts the same. Maybe it’s that there’s no one here to make him feel visible. Maybe that’s why he struggles against all of this. Maybe the reason he dislikes me so much is that I know that about him.

  He blows past me and hops in the front of the SUV. He gets shotgun privileges now, too, since he’s such a good shot. I get in John’s pickup. All dime store psychoanalysis aside, Peter’s acting like a jerk. And to paraphrase what someone once said: When someone shows you who they really are, believe them. And those moments, the ones I thought were the real Peter, were too few and far between to count.

  CHAPTER 68

  We’ve blown as much ammunition as is wise, even though between my dad and John’s stores it seems like we could take over a small country. John asks Ana for one more round before we finish up. He’s seen why some of her shots are going wild.

  Ana puts her gun back in the hip holster and crosses her arms. “No, I’m tired and I don’t want to shoot anymore.”

  “I know you must be tired, but we don’t get to do this often, Ana,” John says. “So it’s best to get it done now. Then we’ll get out of here.”

  He puts out a hand for her pistol, but she has on the same pout as when she was ten and told it was time for bed. She throws up her hands and sits down on a rock. “No! I’m done.”

  Penny kneels to talk to her, but Ana turns her head away. “I don’t want to hear it,” s
he says. “I don’t want to shoot anymore. I don’t want to do this anymore. I just want things to go back to the way they were. I’m not doing all of this anymore.”

  This has got to stop. It’s one thing if she wants to be a baby about helping around the house. It’s quite another when she won’t learn to protect herself. That makes her dangerous to be around when she’s the one watching your back. I’m sick of everyone mollycoddling her. It’s time for Ana and Peter to grow the hell up.

  “Ana, things aren’t the way they were. They’re not going to be,” I say, “at least for a long time.”

  Peter speaks up. “Leave her alone. Not everyone is living out some Laura Ingalls fantasy.”

  It stings partly because it’s true. And because he knows me and is using that knowledge to hurt me, and I hate that he knows me well enough to do that. But mostly it stings because if he really believes that, then what kind of person must he think I am?

  “So I like gardening and sewing and canning, Peter. And that makes me happy to be living like this?”

  His eyes are cruel, the eyes of a stranger, as he shrugs. I can see how much he dislikes me at this moment, and it hurts my feelings, more than I want to admit.

  “I’m just saying that some of us want things to return to normal. That we’re hoping they will soon. That it’s not crazy to think they might. You’re just a bit too happy to be doing all of this, like you’ve been waiting for it.”

  He’s such an asshole. And I want to scream that it is crazy to think things might return to normal soon. It’s batshit crazy. My face is hot and my hands tremble. “Oh, you’ve got me pegged, Peter. Except never once in my fantasy did I wish for two spoiled brats to be constantly snickering behind my back. Sorry that I don’t mope around and act like every little fucking thing I have to do is a terrible burden.”

  Ana narrows her eyes at this, but I don’t care anymore; it’s the truth, and it’s time someone said it.