A Matter of Days (2 page)

I nodded. I’d never really understood all of Dad’s nuggets of military speak he’d cram into his talks and vacation leave. Until this—now they all made an eerie kind of sense.
Be the cockroach. Survive the effect
.

We’d talked about going, about staying. Voted. 2–0. If we’d
split the vote, we’d have flipped a coin. But then fires in the distance seemed to grow darker, bigger, and finally obscured the Seattle skyline completely. We were sitting ducks in this suburb if the fires didn’t go out naturally, and why would they? There was plenty of fuel to burn, enough rain to tamp them down but not to put them out. If this were November, and not April, maybe we’d be stuck to deal until spring, but we could do this.
Have to do this. Get to Uncle Bean and start over
.

“Are you sure you don’t want to say goodbye to Mom?” I paused.

“I did. You licensed to drive yet?” He sent me a mischievous grin like the bratty little brother he used to be.

“How hard can it be?” I smiled. At least the streets were empty. We’d take it slow until I got the gist, but it was a long way from the outskirts of Seattle to West Virginia. And we were alone.

W
e utilized every spare inch in the Jeep—left the backseat bare for sleeping, but Rabbit had to ride with his legs on the dashboard when he sat in the front with me. I couldn’t see out the back window, but it wasn’t like I needed to look behind me.
Onward
.

Rabbit carefully packed the sentimental bits like photo albums on the bottom and important usables like bottled water and toilet paper on the top. He deserved kudos for the organization; his ideas packed more into the Jeep than I’d imagined possible. He’d packed, and unpacked it, while I tended to Mom. We’d known it was only a matter of time before we hit the road. Mom knew it was only a matter of time before she and Dad reunited. If we’d forgotten anything, we’d scavenge on the road, or live without it.

I stuck my parents’ toiletries in a cranny under the driver’s seat and tapped my pocket to make sure I had Dad’s MP3 player. I didn’t look at the house again. Couldn’t.
I hope we have everything. Maybe someday we’ll come back and the house will be here, untouched
. I shook my head; fantasy had a life of its own in this new world.

I shifted the Jeep into reverse and slowly backed down the driveway, with Rabbit calling out directions.
I’m gonna need to see out the back, aren’t I?
My practice with the riding lawn mower, with pedals and steering—which Mom oversaw before—came in handy. Tiny compared with this monster heft, but better than nothing. Family cars lined the driveways and the sides of these suburban streets, as if everyone had taken the day off. Cozy and happy inside their homes.
Appearances are so wrong
.

Rabbit hopped in, his knees up to his chin as we rolled out of our neighborhood. Twisting to stare behind him, he didn’t seem to breathe as our house disappeared into the distance. “Can we stop at Jimmy’s?”

“Just Jimmy’s?” I asked, clenching the steering wheel.
Why couldn’t driver’s ed have been last semester instead of next?

I didn’t know what it was like for Rabbit to look out at the deserted streets and quiet backyards, but for me it was eerie. Bananas crazy. Like a movie set, not real life. Like one of those amusement-park tours Dad loved—“This is where they filmed ‘The End of the World Part Four,’ ” he’d say with a chuckle.

“Well, he is my best friend, and if he’s there alone … What if just kids survived this?”

Rabbit clearly hadn’t figured out that there was something in the shot Uncle Bean gave us.
We’re lucky. Special
. But our survival had to do with our family and not our age.
Maybe I should have shown him Bean’s letter?

The world unfolded differently from the driver’s seat. I didn’t realize how little I had paid attention to streets and landmarks when I was riding shotgun.

Rabbit continued as if my silence wasn’t answer enough. “If he’s alone he can come with us, right?”

I pressed the accelerator harder.
We don’t leave marines behind, Nadia. Yes, Daddy
. “Of course. Sure, we’ll stop.”
Just what I need, two boys to worry about
.

How was this supposed to work? Should we knock on the doors of everyone we’d ever known? Every friend? Classmate? Should we nurse them if they were sick? Bury them if dead?
We’ll never make it to West Virginia by summer
.

Rabbit exclaimed, “You missed a stop sign!”

I slammed on the brakes. “Crap.” We were in the middle of the intersection. There was wildlife, but no traffic. No humans at all.

“Are there cops?” Rabbit giggled, jokingly rubbing his forehead and knees.

“Sorry,” I muttered. The whole thing was so ludicrous, I laughed, too. “Cops? Anymore?” I eased off the brake and started forward again. At the first blank traffic light, I braked and waited for a light of any color to turn on, or flash.

“It’s not on.” Rabbit glanced at me.

“So that means—?” I couldn’t remember Mom’s traffic safety quizzes.
See, Mom? Don’t need to know that stuff
.

“I don’t think it matters, Nadia. There isn’t any traffic.”

“So, I ignore the dead lights?”

“I would. What else are you going to do? Write yourself a ticket?” Rabbit shrugged.

I nodded, easing forward again.

As we drove out of our suburban neighborhood, we saw businesses we used to frequent had been trashed in panic or greed. The Best Buy we passed had boxes and glass shards in the parking lot and the doors were an obliterated tangle of metal and shattered Plexiglas.
Did anyone live long enough to enjoy the stolen electronics that no longer showed any programming, received signals, or had power?
Reduced to plastic and wires, they were useless.

“Did people steal TVs?”

“I think so.” The looting they’d shown on television, while there were still reporters, was catastrophic. People thought they’d be the lone survivors, the kings of the new kingdom.
How’d that work out for you?

“They didn’t take the right stuff.” Rabbit shook his head.

Each store we passed looked the same. There were probably millionaires, with tons of useless cash from robberies, dead in the houses around us or in the apartments of Seattle.

I saw only a few rotting corpses, bloated and bent, unrecognizable as the people they used to be, near doors and against walls. It seemed as if people got only so far and couldn’t go any farther.

Rabbit averted his eyes and whispered, “Sucks to be them.” As if trying to feign nonchalance, he fiddled with the radio dial and found only static of varying annoyance levels. He mumbled and sighed and squirmed in the seat, then asked, “Dia, um, do you think there are zombies?”

Focused on driving around a tangle of cars in an intersection, I didn’t look at my brother’s face.
Is he kidding?
“Where?”

“Anywhere? Here.”

I slowed to a stop and set the parking brake. I turned in
my seat to face him. He glanced at me from beneath his lashes. This world was scary enough without borrowing nightmares. I wanted to make sure he heard my answer. “Only in movies, Rab. No one is going to attack us and eat our flesh.”
I hope
. The run of apocalypse movies and books in the last few years didn’t inspire confidence. I knew so little now, maybe those had been early documentaries. I’d kill us before that happened, but I didn’t think that would comfort Rabbit.

He nodded, but still appeared unconvinced.

I knew I was about to overshare and maybe scare him worse, but I didn’t know what lay ahead of us. I thought of Mom’s endless lecture when she could still talk in coherent sentences. “There may be bad people in the world. They may try to steal our food, or the car, or hurt us, but that’s because they’re desperate, bad people.”

“Why didn’t the bad people die and the good people live?” Rabbit asked in a voice that sounded much younger than his eleven years.

I wish I knew
. I shook my head, as much to clear my thoughts as to buy time to formulate an answer. “I don’t know. I can’t answer that. But I can with complete and utter conviction tell you that there are no zombies. No zombies.”

“Promise?”

“Promise. No zombies.”

Earnest and reassured for the moment, he nodded.

I started driving toward Jimmy’s neighborhood and we passed a whole family laid out in their front yard. Or what used to be a family. Maybe. Hard to tell with all the human puzzle pieces.

“No zombies?” Rabbit ducked his head.

“Nope, just dead bodies. They’re not going to get up and say boo.” Before Mom’s dead body, Dad’s closed casket was the closest I’d come to the dead. After BluStar started, the 24/7 television news bulletins of the sick and dying had been everywhere, while the virus took hold and there were still relatively healthy, or only recently infected, people to report on it. For a while things worked. I assumed computers and backup systems didn’t need humans to keep going. At least for the very short term.

“Turn here. His house is up there. The brown one.” Rabbit pointed.

Jimmy was a blond kid who forever had food caught in his braces and sported a cast on either arm. My dad had called him a pistol.
Why am I already placing him in the past tense?

I pulled into the driveway and noticed right away that the house was frozen in time, drapes pulled. “Do I honk?” It felt rude to hit the horn with the world hushed and heavy.

“I’ll go knock.” Rabbit unbuckled his seat belt with a deep breath.

“No, you won’t. You will stay in the car. I’ll go.” My little brother couldn’t be braver than me. Not today.

He didn’t argue. “There’s a key under the mat.”

“Nuh-uh. I am not going in there. I will knock.” Other people’s houses were creepy in the best of times, which these weren’t. A light sweat broke out along my scalp.

“What if he can’t get to the door, then what?” Rabbit raised his eyebrows like I was a moron.
Sure, Jimmy is alive, but trapped out of reach, waiting for rescue. I’m stuck in a Nickelodeon movie. Cue the happy ending music
.

I rolled my eyes and wanted to stamp my feet. “Fine. I will
open the door. I will call out. I will listen, but I am not going into a house I’ve never been in.” Because the queasy feeling in the pit of my stomach told me Jimmy and his family were not inside. Or they were inside, but dead. Rabbit’s stricken expression had me amending. “If I think he might be in there and alive, I’ll go in, deal?”

Rabbit nodded, seemingly satisfied.

I dragged my feet up to the front door. I kept waiting for the eerie music and strobe lighting of bad slasher flicks. The world didn’t feel right anymore. Like it spun faster on its axis, or gravity had increased tenfold.

I knocked and waited.
Nothing
. I leaned in and tried to see through the window beside the door. Nothing out of the ordinary.

I glanced back at the Jeep and Rabbit motioned. I knew he wanted me to open the door. I swallowed, bent down, and found the key under the mat. I said a quick prayer that zombies really didn’t exist and turned the knob.

W
hen I was little, I used to leave my Strawberry Shortcake dolls in the car in the sun with the windows rolled up. I didn’t do it on purpose, but I took those dolls everywhere. Mom threw up once because the sweet chemical perfume of fake fruit in the hot car was overpowering. I’ll take fake fruit, Mattel-style, over decomposing human any day.

The blast of putrid air doubled me over and I puked into the wilted potted pansies. No one was alive in there. No way.

I shut the front door and jogged back to the vehicle. Sweat dripped down my forehead as my stomach continued to spasm. Rabbit handed me an open bottle of water to swish out my mouth.

We didn’t speak. There weren’t words.

I put the Jeep into reverse and Rabbit plugged his MP3 player into the car’s sound system. He picked Long Good-night’s latest—last—and turned it up until the entire vehicle shook with the beats. Somehow the silence outside deafened us all the same.

I cruised up the on-ramp for I-405 south to 90. Hitchhikers lay in ditches and a few cars hugged the shoulders, but otherwise it was us and a few rats, crows, and the occasional possum up early crossing the road.

Two weeks into the pandemic, everyone was ordered to stay home. Off the roads. Most people complied, more afraid of what was “out there” than what was in their own homes. By that time, there wasn’t a safe place to run to and very few people tried.

I watched the gas tank ebb to half-full. “Crap.”
Hadn’t thought of gas
.

“What’s wrong?” Rabbit hit the pause button when I swore.

“Gas. We’re gonna run out. And then what?”
Nadia, how’d you forget this detail?

Rabbit patted my shoulder. “Chapter seven of that survivor book—we sip on it.”

I shook my head. “What?”

Rabbit reached under his feet and brought out one of the volumes of survival guides Bean shipped us before we’d known what was happening. “We sip on it from another car’s gas tank with the tubing stuff that was in the car.”

Obviously, we couldn’t drink gasoline, so I braked and stopped in the middle of the interstate. “Show me.”

Rabbit handed me the book and pointed.

“Oh,
siphon
it.”

“Yeah, with the tubing.”

“It will either work, we’ll get high, or it’ll kill us.” I spoke out loud without thinking.

“Beats walking across the country, doesn’t it?”

“Good point. Next car we see let’s stop and investigate.” Fears that the only cars on the road would be ones without gas, or contain the dead, went unspoken. Worst case, we’d get off the interstate and go into a residential neighborhood and look there.
I really need to get over my aversion to poking around in other people’s junk if we’re going to survive. They don’t need it anymore
.

“Hey, there’s a state patrol car in the median.” Rabbit pointed. “Somebody’s in there.”

I bleated the horn. If a cop was alive he’d respond. “No movement.”