Hollowland
a novel
by Amanda Hocking
Copyright © 2010 by Amanda Hocking
http://amandahocking.blogspot.com
This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer's imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locales or organizations is entirely coincidental.
All rights are reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the author.
– 1 –
This is the way the world ends – not with a bang or a whimper, but with zombies breaking down the back door.
When the lights first went out, filling the former classroom with frightened gasps, I hadn’t thought much of it. With almost constant blackouts, we were lucky to have power at all.
Then the emergency sirens started wailing.
Even though it was well after midnight, I laid wide awake on my cot, still fully clothed. I jumped up and ran to the large windows. Armed guards and barbed wire lined the perimeter, but when I looked out the window into the night, I couldn’t see any soldiers. Bright flashes lit up the darkness as guns fired, but I couldn’t hear anything over the sirens.
Chaos enveloped the room behind me. Once, not that long ago, this had been an ordinary high school. Now the government kept the uninfected stashed here, quarantined off from the zombies.
I shared the room with twenty-five other girls, ranging in age from ten to twenty. To prepare us for the possibility of an attack, some government officials had set up weekly training with arbitrary safeguards. Now the girls did as they had been taught, propping the army regulation cots on their sides to block the windows and doors.
A girl pushed me out of the way and shoved her cot towards the nearest window, as if it would protect us any better than the glass. It’d do about as much good as the “duck and cover” method against a nuclear bomb, but it was better than nothing.
A loud crash echoed over the sirens, and the building actually trembled.
“They’re inside!” Someone shrieked, and my heart skipped a beat.
My little brother was in another part of the building, set up in a makeshift medical center, and I had to get to him. Private Beck might be with him, but I couldn’t bank on that.
At the thought of Beck, my heart wanted to panic further, but he could take care of himself. Max, on the other hand, needed me.
I grabbed my messenger bag, containing the few earthly possessions I still had, and ran towards the door.
“What are you doing?” Sommer asked. Even though she barely stood five feet tall, she had been chosen to guard the door.
“Getting out of here.” I pulled the cot away from the door. It moved easily for me, and I couldn’t imagine what it would do against intruders.
“Where? Why?” Her voice quivered, and her eyes darted around the room.
I glanced back at the room, full of girls without any real way to protect themselves, and I grimaced. Leaving them stranded like this made me feel guilty, even though I couldn’t do much for them. Part of me wanted to stay, to help if I could, but my brother Max was my top priority.
“I have to get my brother,” I said simply. “Just stay here. Lock the door behind me, and don’t let anyone in.”
When I opened the door, there were a few protests, as if I might let zombies in along with the draft. Nobody tried to stop me, but they were too busy blockading the room. I didn’t blame them.
The dark hallway appeared deserted. Every room on the floor was full, mostly with kids like us, but no one else ventured out. By the sounds of far off screaming, it was for good reason. I heard noises, but the echoing halls made it impossible for me to tell where they came from.
Guns fired, men yelled, things crashed, and – most disturbingly of all – I could hear the familiar death groan the zombies made. Like a low deep rattle and a desperate howl mixed together.
The lights flickered for a moment, then shut off again completely
“Wait!” Sommer said behind me.
She crept out of the room after me, with Harlow trailing at her heels, and I glared back at them. Sommer contained all the nervous energy and usefulness of a chipmunk. Harlow was only thirteen and slept on the cot next to mine, which is probably why she followed me out.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“We’re going with you,” Harlow replied.
Blond hair fell into her frightened eyes, but her voice stayed even. She was loyal to a fault, and I didn’t want her traipsing after me and getting herself killed.
“Go back inside.” I gestured to the door. “You’ll be safer in there.”
“No, I don’t want to be a sitting duck,” Harlow said, barely audible over a distant scream. It sounded human, blood curdled and terrified. Sommer paled.
“Fine.” I shook my head. “But run if I tell you to run, okay? You gotta listen to me.”
Harlow nodded, and I turned and walked down the hall. I should’ve stopped and made them go back. Leaving the safety of the room could get them killed, but then again, so could staying behind. At least this way they could run.
An emergency light flickered dimly in the stairwell, so I went that way. The death groans only got louder as we got closer, but it would be better to run into the zombies in the light than having them sneak up behind us.
The battered lockers lining the halls were plastered with posters, all of them reminders about how to protect against the infected. Most of them were just graphics explaining the emergency procedures – board up the windows and doors.
That was the only real advice about dealing with zombies. Just keep them away, because if they bit you, you were as good as dead. Getting infected was far too easy, even if the zombies didn’t kill you.
When we reached the stairwell, I leaned over the rail. The landing below had three dead zombies and one dead soldier. They had already made it this far into the quarantine.
Harlow gasped when she saw the bodies, but I’d learned to keep my reactions to myself. The coast looked clear for the time being, so I went down the stairs, stopping at the landing. The zombie bodies were mangled with bullets, their weird blood splattered all over everything.
The zombies weren’t really zombies, at least not the kind that rose from the dead and wanted only brains. They were regular people who had been infected with the lyssavirus genotype 8. A mutation of the rabies virus, it only infected humans, and it turned them into something completely monstrous.
Within a day of being exposed, people would begin having symptoms. Headaches, fever, nausea. Then they’d start hallucinating and getting paranoid and aggressive. Within three days, they’d be angry and violent - incapable of rational thought.
The virus overdosed them with adrenaline so they were crazy strong. Worst of all, they’d be insatiably hungry and eat anything, including dirt and other people.
The plan was to quarantine all the uninfected and let the virus run its course. If nobody else got sick, within a month or two, every infected person should be dead. That’s what they promised when we moved in here.
I had been here for over two months, and some people had been here even longer than that. So much for that theory.
The dead zombies on the steps hardly resembled people anymore. Two of them were very thin and clearly at the end stages of the virus, but the third one was fat, almost bloated. Froth covered their lips from , and their skin had gone almost gray. Their jaundiced eyes had dark rings around them. Zombies tended to attack and eat each other, so they were covered in bruises, scratches, and bite marks.
The thing I hated the most about zombies was their blood. It was thicker than human blood, as if always coagulating, and it had a weird greenish tint to it, making it look darker and alien.
I crouched down next to the dead soldier, glancing behind me to make sure a zombie wasn’t about to spring to life and grab my ankle.
Harlow and Sommer waited a few steps up as I started searching around the soldier’s corpse. I kept my eyes fixed on the dead zombies, pretending to watch them, but I just didn’t want to see the soldier’s face. I was afraid I might recognize him.
The thick ooze of zombie blood covered my hands, and I grimaced. I finally found the clip, along with his service revolver. He’d been using a semi-automatic shotgun, and it was still in his hands. I pulled it free, hating the way it felt to loosen a dead man’s grip. I stood up and turned back to Harlow and Sommer.
“Do you know how to use a gun?” I asked them.
Sommer was too busy staring down at the dead soldier. I understood her horror, but it didn’t do any good to let it take over, so I pushed it back. Harlow didn’t answer, either, but at least she managed to make eye contact with me when I spoke.
“Aim and pull the trigger.” I clicked off the safety and handed it to her. “And don’t shoot me.”
Harlow nodded and took the gun. I wiped my hands on my jeans. I didn’t need them slippery, and zombie blood is hella gross.
Shoving the extra magazine in my back pocket, I stepped over the corpses in front of me. The stairs were slick with blood, and I gripped the railing.
I’d only made it down a few steps when the gun went off behind me, and I ducked. Plaster dropped from the wall, and when my heart started beating again, I looked back at Harlow. She was half-sitting on one of the steps, and her wide eyes were apologetic and terrified. She’d slipped on the blood and accidentally pulled the trigger.
“I’m sorry,” Harlow said, and she righted herself and stood up straighter. Presuming she learned her lesson about being careful with firearms, she’d do more good with a gun then without one.
“Well, at least we know you can take care of any zombies on the ceiling,” I said, then turned and hurried down the stairs.
Civilians were housed on the second floor, and the first floor was for army personnel and government officials. The medical facilities were in the gymnasium, and I had to get there for Max.
Blood covered the stairwell door-frame, and I leaned against it, looking down the halls of the main level. Zombie corpses littered the floor, but I saw enough swatches of green camouflage in the bodies to know that they weren’t the only fatalities down here.
Even with dead zombies and soldier on the steps, I couldn’t really believe the zombies had made it in this far. I had thought that the infected would be too crazed to formulate a real attack plan. I was probably right about that, but if there were enough zombies charging, then it didn’t really matter how well thought out it was.
The lights on the first floor flashed red. Things looked deserted, so I stepped out into the hall. I noticed movement a few meters down, something crouched on the ground. My stomach turned when I realized it was a zombie gnawing on a dead body.
I raised the gun and pulled the trigger mid-bite. Its head jerked back, blood sprayed, and it collapsed. Sommer screamed, and I cringed. She wasn’t cut out for this, and I wondered if I’d made a mistake letting her come with. I didn’t want to get her – or the rest of us – killed.
“Sommer, maybe you should go back to the room,” I said, looking back at her. “I can’t have you screaming every time something happens.”
“I’m sorry!” Tears welled in her eyes. “Maybe you could give me a warning.”
“As soon as the zombies let me know when they’re about to attack, I’ll make sure to pass the message along to you.”
“They’ll never let me in.” Sommer gestured to herself. Infected blood had gotten on her clothes, and I knew she was right. None of us would be allowed back in that room. The virus was transmitted the same as rabies, through blood and saliva, but people got paranoid whenever they saw zombie blood anywhere.
“You have to be quiet, alright?” I told her as gently as I could. “I don’t want you attracting any more attention than you need to.”
Biting her lip, Sommer nodded quickly, and I turned and walked down the hall. The ground squished under my feet, and I had to look down without really looking. I didn’t want to step on something that would bite me, but I didn’t want to see what we were walking through. I especially didn’t want to see the soldiers. A lot of them had been my friends, and they died trying to protect us.
Gun blasts echoed from around the corner, and I heard men shouting. I took a step back, pressing myself against the wall so I was hidden behind a trophy case. Harlow followed suit, but I had to physically push Sommer to get her back.
Something was happening, and I couldn’t see anything. I just heard a lot of yelling, death groans, and gun fire.
When the guns fell silent, I leaned forward so I could see around the trophy case. About a dozen or more zombies lurched up the stairs. They moved in a pack, something I’d never seen them do before.
But that’s not what made my stomach twist up. They had gotten past whoever was shooting at them, meaning that the soldiers we’d heard yelling were already dead.
“They’re going upstairs!” Harlow whispered frantically. “Everyone is hiding up there!”
I pursed my lips but didn’t say anything. The gun felt heavy in my hands. If I fired at them, I might kill one or two, but I couldn’t kill them all. The soldiers hadn’t been a match for them. A couple kids with guns wouldn’t stand a chance.
“They’re going to kill everyone!” Harlow looked at me, and I shook my head. We were lucky they were going upstairs and not down here after us.
“Getting ourselves killed won’t save them,” I said thickly. “Besides, they locked the door. They might be safe.”
Once all of the zombies had disappeared up the stairs, I walked the opposite way down the hall. I didn’t want to hear everyone upstairs dying. And everyone up there was dead. They didn’t have any guns or any real protection. Eventually, the zombies would break down the doors. They always did.
I felt sick but I kept walking, stepping carefully over the bodies. I’d never seen a massacre this bad.
When the virus popped up almost a year ago, it spread like wild fire, but I had never seen so many zombies together. Even the ones that had gotten my mom and dad had only been in a group of three. This had to be hundreds. Something different was happening.
We had to round another corner before we made it to the gym. I heard one gun shot, and then silence. I raised my gun and slowly turned the corner, afraid to find another pack of the infected.
Instead, I saw a single soldier. He stood in the middle of the hall, his gun pointed down at the zombie corpses. He watched to see if they were still alive, and then he killed them if they were.
I lowered my weapon and stepped out.
“Hey!” I announced myself before he shot us.
He turned to me, automatically pointing the rifle at me, and my heart surged. Even at that distance with a gun in front of his face, I’d recognize him anywhere.
“Remy?” Beck asked, sounding just as relieved and surprised as I felt, and he lowered the gun. “What are you doing?”
“I heard the zombies knocking, so I thought I’d come down and let them in,” I said with a wry smirk. I walked down the hall, fighting the urge to run to him, and checked behind to make sure Harlow and Sommer were following me quickly.
“Your brother’s fine,” Beck said, knowing exactly what had drawn me out. “They already evacuated him.”
“What do you mean they evacuated Max?” I asked, not sure if I should feel relieved or anxious. This wasn’t the safest place anymore, but the open road wasn’t that great either.
“As soon as the quarantine was compromised, they got all the medical out,” Beck said and looked uneasily at Harlow and Sommer. “You shouldn’t be out here. You should’ve stayed in your rooms.”
“The second floor has been compromised too.” I lowered my eyes. “We just saw the zombies rush up there.”
Beck stared down the hall towards the stairwell, debating whether or not he should go help them, or if he should stay to help us. If I’d been a more selfless person, I would’ve sent him up there. But I needed his help, and I didn’t want him on a suicide mission.
“You’ve got to get out of here,” Beck said. He nodded in the other direction and put his hand on my back to usher us away.
“Where are they taking Max? I need to go with him.” I looked up at Beck, but he didn’t answer. He was too focused on getting us out of the school alive.
Three zombies stood by the exit. They hung out there, as if they were waiting to stop people from escaping. Since there was only three of them, Beck shot them down quickly.
“What are they doing?” Harlow asked, referring to the zombies’ unusual behavior.
“I don’t know,” Beck said, his voice cracking.
I looked up at him, sensing something more than the trauma going on around us. In the months I had known him, I’d never seen anything rattle him.
The glass doors had been broken in, blood staining the remaining shards poking out from the frame. Beck leaned out first, but I heard the death groans. I looked past his shoulder, and I could see them, massed around the outside of the school, moving like a very slow mosh pit.
“What the hell is going on?” I asked.
“It’s like they were drawn here or something.” Beck straightened up and looked at me. “They’ve trampled the fence for the most part. If I distract them, you can make a run for it.”
“You can’t stay here,” I said. “Zombies have overtaken the place.”
“It’s my job,” Beck brushed me off. “I’m not entirely sure where they took your brother. There is another quarantine near Wyoming, so maybe there. If you keep going north from here, you’ll find something.”
“I don’t even really know where north is.” I was only half-lying. I wasn’t great at directions, but I didn’t want to leave Beck behind to die here.
“When I open these doors, I’m going to run towards the zombies, shooting,” Beck said, ignoring me. “The three of you need to run for an opening in the fence and keep running. You can’t stop, no matter what happens.”
“No, you can’t do that,” I shook my head.
“I have to stay here.” Beck eyed the zombies outside.
I could hear soldiers, somewhere on the lawn outside of my vision, and a lot of the zombies were busy trying to take them out. The rest kind of wandered around, occasionally fighting amongst each other.
“They might not even notice if we’re real quiet,” I said.
“No, I can’t go with you.” He looked down at me gravely.
I still didn’t understand, so he pulled up the sleeve of his shirt, revealing the crescent shape of teeth marks in his arm. My heart clenched but I tried to keep my face blank.
I stared at him, trying to reconcile this. He’d been invincible since I met him. Without him, Max and I never would’ve survived. He made sure we were both safe and helped us as long as we’d been here. And through everything he’d seen and done, he always had an easy smile.
“They’re getting restless.” Harlow pulled me from my thoughts. The gaggle of zombies seemed to be making their way towards the door.
“You’ve got to go,” Beck said emphatically.
“You’re not infected yet,” I said. I did not want to leave him, and I wasn’t even sure that I could.
“Go.” His eyes were moist. “You don’t have any more time if you want to make it out alive, and Max needs you.”
I nodded, unable to think of something to say. I knew this would be the last time I’d ever speak to him, but I had nothing. I just turned and pushed open the shattered doors.
His gun started blasting, and I couldn’t look back. I ran as fast as my legs would move.
Mangled fencing and barbwire bent all over the ground at the edge of the lawn. I stumbled on it, but I caught myself before I fell. Tears threatened my eyes, but I refused to let them fall. Zombies growled behind me, and I didn’t have any time to waste on emotions.
The school lay on the edge of town, and nothing but desert stretched out before us. My feet pounded on the dirt, and my legs burned from running. A pain shot down my side, and I felt like throwing up.
I didn’t stop until I heard Harlow yelling my name. Even then, I only slowed down.
“Remy!” Harlow yelled. “Remy! Wait!”
Reluctantly, I stopped and turned around. I gasped for breath, but I liked that better. I liked it when my body hurt so bad I couldn’t feel anything else. It was almost freeing.
In the moonlight, I saw Harlow and Sommer trailing behind. Way off in the distance, I could see the quarantine. I’d run much farther than I thought.
The only reason I could still see the school was because it was on fire. To contain the infection, they'd burned it to the ground, and burned up any survivors who might still be in there.
I was so mesmerized by the fire and trying not to think about Beck that I didn’t notice the shadow creeping up behind Harlow and Sommer. We were all breathing too loud to hear anything.
I didn’t see anything until the zombie dove at Sommer, and she started to scream.
– 2 –
By the time I raised my gun, he was already on her.
Sommer tumbled to the ground with the monster clinging to her back. His claws raked down her arms, and his frothy drool spilled over her. Just before his teeth sunk into the soft flesh of her neck, I fired at him.
Gelatinous blood sprayed out from the wound, and his head tilted back. He slumped down, drooling and bleeding all over Sommer’s fresh cuts. She was still screaming when she scrambled out from underneath him.
But it was already too late.
“Sommer, you’re okay!” Harlow ran to her aide.
Harlow’d been standing off to the side, stricken and shocked while the zombie attacked, with her gun forgotten in her hand. As soon as my gun had gone off, she burst into motion. She dropped her gun and rushed over to Sommer.
Harlow put her hands on her shoulders, mindful of the scratches, and tried to snap Sommer out of it. When Sommer finally stopped screaming, she just stared vacantly, and I’m not sure how much better that was.
The zombie made a hollow breathing sound, so I walked over to make sure it was dead. I had blown off half its face, thanks to the close range, and it stood no chance of getting up again. It kept breathing. Part of me really wanted to shoot it again, but I couldn’t waste the bullets.
I stepped back and scanned the darkness. The land around us was barren, save a few shrubs and rocks. The whole world felt more deserted than ever before, and the vegetation seemed happy to accommodate.
The flames from the quarantine billowed higher, making it easier to see that nothing was coming. Most of the zombies had been in a hurry to get there. The one that had gone after Sommer had been a straggler, but I didn’t want to take any chances.
“Are more coming?” Sommer asked.
“I think they’re all at the barbecue,” I said and lowered my gun.
Harlow had let go of Sommer, and she wiped her hands on her skirt, getting the blood off. Sommer looked around to make sure we weren’t surrounded. She didn’t realize the bigger issue at hand.
“Do you have any cuts on your hands?” I asked Harlow quietly. It occurred to her what I was asking, so she started wiping her hands more roughly.
“No, I don’t,” she shook her head but kept her eyes locked on Sommer, the sadness setting in.
“Come on. We have to keep moving.” I started walking away. Harlow shot a confused look between me and Sommer, then picked up the revolver and followed me.
“Where are we going?” Sommer jogged after us, but I stopped. Swallowing, I turned back to face her.
“No,” I said softly. “You can’t come with us.”
I motioned to the scratches on her arm. The way the zombie had drooled and bled all over her, she had to be infected.
“What?” Sommer didn’t understand at first, then frantically wiped at her arm, as if she could clean out the infection. “No. It’s just a scratch. I’ll be fine.”
“Maybe,” I said. “But I can’t take the risk.”
“You can’t just leave me out in the middle of the desert!” Sommer cried, tears streaming down her cheeks.
She was a small, fragile girl, and she’d just been injured. I didn’t want to leave her out here, but I had only two options in this situation, and she would like the second one even less.
“I’m sorry.” I turned away from her, but she kept following us.
“What if more zombies come?” Sommer asked.
“I’m sorry,” I repeated. Fighting back tears, I kept my voice even. I still had the shotgun in my hand, and when she kept approaching, I aimed at her. “You can’t come with us.”
“But what if I’m not infected?” Sommer pled with me, and I felt Harlow watching me.
“I have to get to my brother, and I can’t do that if you turn into a zombie and kill us. I don’t want to kill you, so I’d rather leave you here now, with a chance of survival.”
“But…” Sommer didn’t have an argument for that, and her whole body slacked.
She stared helplessly at me, and I wished I had something better to offer her. I knew she wouldn’t try to follow us this time, so I turned my back on her and kept walking north.
“I’m sorry, Sommer,” Harlow said, waiting behind me a moment longer. “I’ll never forget you.”
Sommer didn’t say anything, but I don’t know how anybody could respond to that. We’d just left her in the desert to die.
I’d just created another vessel to spread the damn virus. I made the zombie problem worse, but I couldn’t bring myself to kill her. Not when she was still a person, with rational thought and emotions. I wouldn’t hesitate once she was a zombie, though, and I hoped I didn’t run into her then.
Harlow hurried to meet my pace, and neither of us said anything for a while. I glanced over at her, and I could see the moon glinting off her silent tears. I tried to think of something comforting to say, but I had nothing.
I hadn’t even shed a tear over Beck, and as soon as I realized that, I pushed it from my mind. I didn’t want to cry for him or anyone else.
“Maybe I should’ve left her my gun,” Harlow said at length. She still held it, so I took it from her and clicked on the safety. The last thing I needed was for her to shoot off her foot or something.
“You need it more,” I reminded her. I handed the gun back to her. Harlow shoved it in the waist of her skirt, and it looked weird and bulky in her outfit.
Harlow wore a lace trimmed skirt and a matching camisole, with a loose cardigan hanging over it. She had a messenger bag covered in glitter, overflowing with her belongings.
Her long blond curls framed her face, speckled with blood, and a gold cross hung around her neck on a chain. To top off the ensemble, she had on black combat boots that were at least a size too big. With th gun shoved in her skirt, she was the poster child for post-apocalyptic fashion.
I clicked the safety on my own gun and wedged it between the strap of my messenger bag and my back, so I wouldn’t have to carry it. The farther we walked, the quieter it got, and I would be able to hear a zombie coming from a mile away.
“What if she doesn’t turn into one of those zombies?” Harlow asked.
“They all do.”
“Why didn’t you say anything to her?” she asked.
“Like what? That I’d never forget her?” I shook my head. “I hope I do forget her. I don’t want to remember every person who died. That’s far too many people.”
“What about that soldier? Beck?” Harlow asked. I swallowed hard and quickened my pace. “Was he your boyfriend?”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” I said. “He taught me how to shoot.”
When Beck had found my brother and me, it was a miracle we were still alive. I didn’t know anything about survival or fighting off zombies, and Beck taught me everything I know. Without him, I’d never have been able to make it through the last few months.
“Were you in love with him?” Harlow asked, matching my pace.
“I don’t wanna talk about it.”
“Sorry,” she said, but she wasn’t easily deterred. Within a minute of falling silent, she started asking me questions again. “Where are we going?”
“North. Another quarantine.”
“Why?” Harlow asked.
“To find my brother.” I glanced down at her. “Weren’t you listening when I was talking to Beck?”
“Yeah, but I didn’t really understand. He said something about them evacuating your brother. Why would they do that?”
“Because the quarantine was compromised.”
“Why didn’t they evacuate all of us?” Harlow asked.
“I don’t know. I’m not in charge of the army.”
“But he was sick, right? That’s why he didn’t live with us?” She had asked me about him before when we were living in the quarantine. I hadn’t said much then, and I didn’t want to say much now.
“Right,” I sighed.
“With what?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“But that’s weird that they would evacuate a sick kid, but not a bunch of healthy people.” She talked more to herself than to me, so I didn’t feel the need to respond. “When you think about how low the population is, it’s even weirder that they’d prioritize one sick kid over all of the healthy people they left on the second floor.”
I ignored her and walked even faster. By now, I was almost jogging, but she somehow kept with me, even though she was shorter than I was.
“How old is he?” Harlow asked.
“He’s eight.”
“How old are you?” Harlow cocked her head at me, speculating.
“Nineteen.”
“What’s his name?”
“Max,” I sighed and slowed down. I couldn’t waste all my energy trying to hurry her into dropping the subject. “His sign is Pisces, his favorite color is green, his eyes are blue, and he loves spaghetti but hates meatballs. Is there anything else you’d like to know about him?”
“No,” Harlow sounded a little dejected. “Sorry.” She had gotten quieter, so I glanced over at her. She stared down at the ground and fiddled with her cross necklace. “I just wanted to talk so I wouldn’t have to think about everything that happened at the quarantine. I actually felt safe there, for the first time since before my mom died.”
I exhaled and guilt crept in. I was one of the very lucky few who still had a surviving family member. Max and I were orphans, but we had each other. The only thing Harlow had was… well, me.
“I’m sorry,” I softened. “I know how rough this is. I try not to think about any of it, ever.”
“I know. Me too.” Harlow kept fidgeting with her cross necklace, but she looked up as we walked. “It is weird what happened back there, right?”
“Weird is kind of a relative term,” I said. “It wasn’t that long ago when zombies would’ve been defined as weird.”
“Yeah,” Harlow smiled at that. “I meant the way they were all together. I’d never seen so many of them all at once. Usually it’s like five or maybe ten. There had to be hundreds back there, to take out that many soldiers.”
“There weren’t that many soldiers,” I said, deflecting the point she made. “There were only about fifty soldiers, and two hundred or so of us.”
“But they were working together,” Harlow pressed on. “Didn’t it seem that way? That the zombies had planned the attack?”
“Zombies can’t plan anything.” I shook my head. “If they were capable of rational thought, then they’d be people. The infection eats at their brain, stripping away all the things that make us human.”
“I know that’s what they told us,” Harlow said. “But how much do they really even know about the virus? It hasn’t even been a year since the outbreak started, and then once it started spreading, everything pretty much shut down. Nobody is an expert on it.”
“All I know is that if you shoot them, they die. If you get their blood or saliva in your blood or saliva, you die,” I said. “That’s all I need to know.”
“I just think this whole thing is weird,” she muttered.
“Yeah, this whole thing is weird,” I agreed. “Don’t try to make sense of it because you can’t. Everything is just really, really messed up.”
“If you really believe that, then why are you trying so hard to find your brother?” Harlow asked.
“Because. He’s my little brother. If the world is gonna end, I’d like to be with him.”
“And you don’t know where he is?”
“I’ll find him.” I was surprised by my own conviction, but I knew that I could. I’d made it through everything with him. Finding him at a government quarantine couldn’t be that hard.
We were somewhere in the desert in the South Western United States, but I didn’t know exactly where. Max and I lived in Iowa before all this happened, and then we started running. We kept moving until Beck found us and shipped us out here.
City and state delineations didn’t matter as much as they used to. Everything was an abandoned waste land anyway.
When the sun started rising to my right, I knew I really was heading north. I tried to navigate by the night sky, but other than Orion, constellations remained a mystery to me.
If we ever found a city, I’d have to look for a compass. And maybe a map. As it was, I hadn’t seen any roads or signs. We were wandering blind in the desert, the sun was coming up, and we didn’t have any water.
We approached a hill, covered in dry brush and loose sand. I climbed up, my feet slipping on the ground, but Harlow lagged behind me.
“I’m tired,” Harlow had been quiet for a long time, and her voice pierced through the silence. It didn’t help that I was getting tired, too. “And thirsty.”
“If you see a drinking fountain and a bed, feel free to stop.”
“Can’t we take a break at least?” Harlow asked. “There aren’t any zombies around.”
“We’re not stopping until we find some place to stop at. We need to cover as much ground as we can during the daylight.”
Harlow opened her mouth to say something else, but I shushed her. I heard something.
I’d scrambled to the top of the hill and knelt down, so I was mostly hidden. I squinted and made out shapes on the horizon. It sounded like a death groan, but there was something else. Almost like a grunt and a growl. I couldn’t place it, but I didn’t think it was zombie.
We could turn and go in the other direction and completely avoid them, and that might be the smart thing to do. But I didn’t want to veer off course. It would be hard enough for me to stay on course without any detours.
Besides, after watching everyone I know get killed by zombies last night, it might feel good taking some of them out.
Harlow had climbed up next to me. I showed her how to click off her safety, and I took out my shotgun. There were definitely zombies, I could see them, but something else made a strange guttural roar. It didn’t really make sense.
Then I finally put it together, and I stopped and stared.
– 3 –
“Is that… a lion?” Harlow asked, sounding just as shocked as I felt.
A truck had been tipped on its side, and attached to the truck bed with a logging chain appeared to be a lion. It didn’t have a mane, but it was pretty big, so I’m guessing it was a lioness. Surrounding her were several corpses, and a semi-circle of living zombies.
She paced back and forth, and the zombies kept trying to eat her or stop her or whatever it was they wanted to do with a lion. But she swatted at with them her giant paw. While we watched, she got one of the zombie’s legs and completely tore it off.
I crouched down on the ground, and Harlow did the same behind me. The zombies were too focused on the lion to notice us, so we could get around them without any problems. But the lion kept making that weird low growling sound, as if she was sad.
“Stay here,” I said, getting to my feet.
“What are you doing?” Harlow sounded scared, but I didn’t answer her.
I didn’t really know what I was doing, but I had to do something. Animals were immune to the virus, and the lion would be the first thing I’d helped in months that could actually live if I intervened. I could save her.
If I left her chained to the truck, she would die. If I let her go, she might kill Harlow and me. But since somebody had chained her up in the first place, I assumed she was at least partially tame.
When the lion spotted me, she stopped. Her tail twitched and one of her ears bent back, but she didn’t growl.
Unfortunately, the zombies noticed me at the same time. A fat, dirty zombie started charging towards me. I could shoot him, but I was afraid a gunshot would startle the lion.
I pulled my gun out, holding it by the muzzle. When the zombie got close enough, I swung it like a baseball bat. My shoulders jerked on impact, and it made a loud crack as the head smashed in.
That one summer I spent playing T-ball had finally paid off.
Another zombie charged towards me, but this one was much taller. I couldn’t knock his head off. I bent down and swung the gun across its ankles, taking his feet out from under him so he collapsed back on the ground. Before he could stand up, I ran to his head and slammed the butt of my gun down on his skull.
Crushing a skull is not as easy as it sounds. The first blow stunned him, but I had to slam it down twice more before it finally smashed into his brain, and he stopped moving.
Even though I knew they were zombies, that they weren’t people anymore, the sound of breaking bone always made me sick. The sight of their splattered blood on my clothes didn’t help either, but I didn’t even have time to worry about it before another one raced at me.
I rammed the gun forward, using it like a sword to impale the zombie in the stomach. She’d had the virus for a while, so she’d started to decompose, and her body felt like Jell-O when I stabbed her with the gun.
It wasn’t until then that I realized she was a kid. I hated kid zombies.
She stopped moving, but only because the gun didn’t let her go farther forward. She reached her short, pudgy arms out at me, and I jerked back, taking the gun with me.
I didn’t want to scare the lion, but I wasn’t about to do hand to hand combat with a rotting kid. I shot the zombie in the head, and she collapsed onto the ground.
The gun blast startled the lion, and she moved back with her ears flattened. But it also startled the last zombie, which stood dangerously close to the lion. The lion pounced on his back and tore into his throat, killing him before I had a chance to aim.
“Are they all dead?” Harlow called from behind me.
“Yeah, I think so.” I looked around to be sure, but I couldn’t see any moving zombies
The lion licked the blood off her lips and looked up at me. She was pretty damn vicious, but maybe that was just directed towards zombies. Harlow came up and stood next to me, both of us just watching the lion.
“You’re gonna let her go.” Harlow might have been asking it, but it sounded more like a statement of fact.
“I’m gonna try,” I nodded.
“What if she rips your arm off?” Harlow asked, but she didn’t sound worried.
“I don’t know. Shoot her, I guess,” I shrugged.
I walked up closer to the lion but stayed out of range of her chain. Harlow crept behind me, staying a few steps back from where I stopped.
A body inside the cab of the truck hadn’t even bloated up yet, the way bodies did when they sat in the sun all day. It didn’t look like it had been dead for very long.
Another body lay a few feet from the truck, but still out of the range of the lion. It’d been torn apart, and it was safe to say that zombies had gotten it.
“What happened?” Harlow asked.
I looked around for the first time since we’d climbed over the hill. A highway ran about twenty or thirty feet on the other side of the truck, and relief rushed over me. We needed to find a highway if we wanted to find somewhere to camp out.
“I think they were driving, and they went off the road, crashed. One of them died in the wreck, and the zombies got the other one. And for some reason, they had a lion chained up in the back.”
“Do you think she’s tame?” Harlow asked.
I eyed up the lion. Her ears were up, her eyes were wide, but her tail kept flicking back and forth. From my experience with house cats, that usually meant they were going to pounce on something.
“Maybe. But I don’t know how tame lions can really be.” I took a careful step closer to the lion, and she didn’t move. “Take your gun out.”
“You want me to shoot her?” Harlow asked nervously.
“Not unless you have to.” I set my own gun on the ground. I didn’t want to scare her, but I didn’t want to be completely exposed.
I took slow, deliberate steps towards the lion, and when I got to the edge of her reach, I waited a beat. I half-expected her to pounce, but she didn’t move. She just watched me.
I wasn’t stupid enough to go and undo the chain from around her neck, so I headed towards the truck. I held my hands out in front of me and made sure I always faced her. In some part in the back of my mind, I was freaking out about how much of an idiot I was being.
All I wanted to do was get to my brother, and I was risking my life trying to free a stupid cat.
I got to the truck without her mauling me, but I found a new problem. The chain was looped through a hole in the truck, held in place with a giant lock in need of a key. I’d never tried shooting through a chain to break it, but I suspected that this one was too large.
“Aw, hell.” I looked back at Harlow. She had the gun pointed at either the lion or me, I’m not sure which, and her hands were shaking. “Harlow, put down the gun.”
“Are you sure?” Harlow asked, but she looked relieved. If we ever found extra bullets, I’d have to teach her how to shoot.
“I need you to go into the cab of the truck and get the keys,” I said. “The chain is locked to the truck, and I need a key.”
“But there’s a body in the truck,” Harlow grimaced.
“There are bodies all over. Please just get the keys before the lion eats me.”
“Why don’t we just leave her here?” She was tired, scared, and did not want to crawl around a decomposing corpse. “I mean, you left Sommer in the desert-”
“Just get the damn keys, Harlow!” I snapped before she could finish her thought. I didn’t need to be reminded of all the people that I couldn’t save.
When I shouted, the lion bent back her ears but didn’t move. Harlow opened the door to the cab of the truck, and flies swarmed out. She made a retching sound, and the lion growled. When she climbed inside the cab, she swore loudly.
The lion started pacing, and I again reminded myself that I could die over this. I could die for no good reason at all.
Harlow gasped and jumped out of the cab faster than I had ever seen her move before. She gagged and threw up in the sand. I looked away, but the lion watched with intense fascination, her tail still flicking wildly.
“I have never smelled anything that bad in my entire life!”
“Yeah, that really sucks. Toss me the keys please!” I shouted.
Harlow spit a few times, pushing dirty tangles of hair back from her face, then stood up and threw the keys at me. They landed at my feet, and I picked them up.
“What happens when you let her go?” Harlow asked between spitting on the ground.
“What?” I asked, trying a key in the lock. It clicked open, and I almost shouted with happiness.
“I mean, she’s not gonna be on a chain. What if she wants to eat us?” Harlow asked as soon as I’d unlocked the lion.
I stood there, debating on whether or not I should lock her up again, then shook my head and pulled it off.
“She won’t eat us,” I decided. I pulled the chain free from the truck and tossed it on the ground. “There you go! You’re free! Go!”
The lion stared at me. I don’t know what I expected her to do, but it wasn’t this. Her tail swung more slowly, but she wasn’t going anywhere. I waved my arms to shoo her along, but she just bent an ear back and looked around.
I walked back to Harlow and picked up my gun. It was slick with zombie blood, so I wiped it off on my jeans. As soon as we got some place we could rest, I had to change these pants. They were disgusting.
The lion kept staring at us, so I carried my gun as we walked towards the highway, in case she decided to pounce. We made it halfway to the road when the lion started walking in our direction. She wasn’t running, like she was chasing us, but she walked kind of fast.
“Should we do something?” Harlow asked.
“Like what?”
“I don’t know.” She looked back at the lion. “I feel like we should do something.”
“She’s not doing anything.”
“Yet,” Harlow amended.
“Right. When she does something, we’ll react accordingly,” I said, as if I knew what that meant.
The lion kept following us, getting closer as we walked along, but it didn’t feel like she was stalking us. Despite her size, she didn’t seem that old. She’d probably been raised in captivity and didn’t know how to be alone.
Eventually, Harlow stopped being freaked out by it. The sun had gotten higher, and it beat down on us. She pulled her hair back into a loose bun, the way I always wore my long hair. I couldn’t defend myself when my hair was in the way. I had been wearing a button up shirt over a tank top, but I tied the shirt around my waist a long time ago.
“I am so tired and thirsty and my feet are killing me,” Harlow said, but it was too weak to even be a whine.
She trudged along, dragging her feet on the road. The lion walked a few feet to the side of her, and it didn’t even bother her anymore. She shoved her cardigan in her messenger bag, but one of the sleeves hung out, dragging on the ground.
“We’ll get there soon,” I said.
“Where?” Harlow asked.
“There.” I nodded at a dark spot on the horizon. I had been seeing it for a while, but we were close enough now where I could be certain it was something.
“What?” She perked up a bit and squinted in the distance. “Are those houses?”
“I think it’s a town.”
The sun was setting by the time we reached the new development on the edge of town. Several houses were in the middle of being built when construction stopped. Backhoes and equipment lay discarded in half-dug basements. Wooden skeletons of houses jutted out from rocks and sand.
We went into the first finished-looking house we came to, but the inside had barely been completed. It didn’t even have fixtures yet. The next few houses were in a nearly identical state. I decided to venture past the newer construction until we saw a cul-de-sac that looked finished. We finally found a giant McMansion with all the signs of life, including blood on the open front door.
I slowly pushed the door open. Pictures of smiling people hung on the wall in the entryway. I stepped in a bit more to find slightly mauled art deco furniture and blood splatters on the floor. Harlow pushed past me and darted inside.
“Somebody lived here!” Harlow squealed
“Harlow, wait! We don’t know if anything’s here!” I said but didn’t stop her. The blood looked old, and if we didn’t get something to drink soon, we were all in trouble.
Harlow had already thrown open the fridge when I got to the kitchen. We needed bottled water. Tap water tended to be a hit or a miss and had the possibility of being contaminated.
Harlow yanked out several bottles of Fiji water, and I grabbed one. They were warm, and the fridge reeked of spoiled food, but I didn’t care. I opened the bottle and drank from it greedily.
We both finished a whole bottle of water before I realized that the lion had to be even thirstier than we were. She’d been following us around the development, and I heard her chain dragging as she wandered around the house.
“Kitty, kitty!” I shouted, and Harlow gave me an odd look. “Here kitty, kitty! Ripley!”
“Ripley?” Harlow furrowed her brow.
“Yeah, I figured if she’s gonna be following us around, we ought to give her a name.”
“But Ripley?” She raised an eyebrow.
“She’s badass,” I shrugged. “You saw what she did to those zombies. So she needed a badass name. Like Sigourney Weaver in those Alien movies.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Harlow shook her head
“The woman’s name was Ripley, and she killed everything,” I tried to explain. “She was the toughest chick I’ve ever seen.”
“Alright. Whatever.” She was already wandering away. “I’m gonna go see if I can find anything else I need.”
“Ripley!” I yelled again. “Here kitty kitty!”
Harlow screamed and dropped her bottles of water as the lion ran past with the massive chain clattering behind her, and then dove on the marble kitchen island. It scared the hell out of me, too, but I tried not to show it. Ripley flicked her tail and stared down at me.
“Stupid cat.” Harlow collected her water and headed off to scout out the rest of the house.
I rummaged through the cupboards and found a metal baking bowl. I set it on the kitchen counter across from the island and started filling it with water.
Ripley jumped from the island to the counter and began drinking before I’d finished. She started purring as she lapped it up, and I didn’t even know lions could purr.
“Yeah, you like the name Ripley, don’t you?” She kept purring, and I nodded as if she’d actually agreed with me.
While Ripley drank her water and Harlow explored the rest of the house, I went to the pantry to look for food. I found a couple cans of salmon, tuna, SPAM, and baked beans, and that was about it for things we could actually eat. A lot of stuff had gone bad or been broken.
The whole house had been ransacked by something else, and by the random, bloody state of everything, I’d say it was a zombie.
I set all the edible food on the counter and decided I needed to hit a bedroom for some new clothes. The clothes I was wearing were ratty and covered in blood, and the few extra I had in my messenger bag weren’t much better.
I’d made it halfway up the grand, winding staircase in the foyer when I heard Ripley growling. Then there was a loud clatter, followed by a gun going off, and Harlow screaming.
– 4 –
I leapt over the banister, landing on the floor in a way that sent a searing pain through my ankle, but I ignored it and ran into the living room. Once I got there, I realized that the gunshot had come from the living room, but Harlow’s scream came from upstairs. She had screamed because she heard the gun.
While I had been making my way upstairs, two guys had come in through the patio doors off the living room, and Ripley caught them. Her chain clattered, they got frightened, and from the bullet hole in the wall way, way above Ripley’s head, I assumed they were terrible shots.
Ripley stood in the middle of the living room, looking pissed off and confused.
“Whoa! Whoa!” I ran in front of Ripley, blocking her from hurting them and them from hurting her, and belatedly realized how dumb that was.
I didn’t know if I could prevent Ripley from attacking anything, and she might lunge at me if she was scared. Two guys were here, and one of them held a gun, which was now pointed at me since I had stepped in front of it.
I stood between a lion and a gunman, and both of them might kill me just for the hell of it.
“What’s going on?” Harlow yelled from the top of the stairs.
“Stay upstairs!” I shouted.
“Put the gun down!” That was the gun-less young man, talking to his friend. He was the taller of the two, with sandy blond hair and reassuring gray eyes.
“No way,” the gunman said. The hand holding the shotgun quivered, and black hair kept falling into his eyes, so he couldn’t even take aim properly. He gestured at Ripley with the gun. “Is that thing safe?”
“She’s a lion, and uh, yeah, she is,” I said. I actually had no idea if she was, but I liked it better when I didn’t have a gun pointed at me, so I lied.
“Just put down the gun,” his friend said, putting his hand on the barrel to gently push it down. He was the older of the two, and he seemed much calmer.
“It’s a fricking lion!” The gunman completely lowered his weapon, but he was still freaked.
Once I could clearly see his face, he looked incredibly familiar. I squinted, as if that would make me place him better. He was attractive, with dark eyes, and tattoos decorating both arms. He looked closer to my age, but I couldn’t figure out where I knew him from.
“Well, it’s her lion!” His blond friend shook his head and took the gun away, smiling apologetically at me. “I’m sorry. We didn’t mean to intrude. We didn’t know anyone still lived here.”
“It’s okay,” I shrugged. “We’re intruding, too. They have some bottled water in the kitchen.”
“Really? Oh my god.” Without further invitation, the former gunman dashed across the room, jumping over the couch on his race to the kitchen. I glanced back at Ripley to make sure that she didn’t decide he was food, and she watched him with her ears bent back.
“Sorry about him,” the other guy said, nodding at his friend, who shouted happy expletives in the kitchen. “I’m Blue.”
“What? You mean like your name is Blue?” I raised an eyebrow. “Like the color?”
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