LEFT ALIVE (Zombie series Box Set): Books 1-6 of the Post-apocalyptic zombie action and adventure series (92 page)

But there’s another possibility. Retirement homes and old folks' centers always had clinics on staff that would have their resources fully stocked and equipped to help their clients and patients. What are the odds of them being fully cleaned out? If anything, old folks' homes would have been neglected, the elderly abandoned in the chaos of the world’s collapse. I like that idea. There’s potential here with that. We might be able to find a clinic on the grounds of a retirement center that’s fully stocked still. We’ll just have to bust a window open and have a look around.

Well, those are some places to start, but how in the world are we supposed to find retirement centers and schools? I look toward Dayton and feel like I’m staring down the barrel of a gun. We’re on a time schedule here. I look at Greg, who is barely awake. I wish that I had another person to bounce ideas off of. I hate being the one in charge of our survival right now. This is all too personal, too heavy.

“How do you find where places are without the internet?” I ask Greg.

“Ask Siri,” Greg grins.

I would roll my eyes if I wasn’t so disgusted by the speed of the jokes that are just flipping out of his lips with alarming ease. He needs to be slapped, not encouraged. Suddenly, I think about Siri and how we used to just ask the internet for directions to everything. But that wasn’t always the case. You used to have to look it up and that meant having a phonebook. That’s how we’re going to find out where all of the schools and retirement homes and hospitals are. We’re going to have to find a phonebook first. I smile and slap Greg on the shoulder.

“We need to find a phonebook,” I tell him as I shut his door and rush around over to the driver’s side.

“Who the hell has a phonebook anymore?” Greg asks through the cavernous windshield.

“I don’t know,” I tell him honestly. “But we’re going to have to find out where they live.”

Chapter Three

“Who the hell has a phonebook anymore?” Lexi asks as she looks at the approaching buildings. There are charred shells and skeletons of buildings that once stood to either side of the street, but ahead I can see buildings that remain, more or less, intact. It looks like there was a battle here and the fringe of the city suffered the most of it. As we approach Dayton, we look for a subdivision, not wanting to head into the heart of the city where supplies will no doubt be fought over. The idea of finding businesses only conjures up images of those things walking around, looking for food. The thought of it sends chills down my spine as we continue driving in our hobbled truck.

“Right?” Greg asks with a grin on his lips as he looks from Lexi to me.

“Someone has to have a phonebook,” I tell them impatiently, tired of the heckling that I’m getting for having a brilliant plan. They’re both a couple of bastards to make fun of the only person with an idea. If I weren’t here, Lexi would be stuck with a corpse and an infant. Staring out at the buildings, I don’t like the looks of this area. There aren’t enough houses and all of the buildings are looking a little too solid and tiny-windowed for comfort. We’re in a commercial sector of the city. I take a right and wind my way north through the ruins of the burned out, blown up portion of the city where heavy debris lingers where the lighter stuff has blown away in the hurricane gusts that have plagued the surface of the earth for a while now. “We used to throw them away all the time when they delivered them to the house.”

“I doubt they kept printing them in the past couple of years,” Lexi grumbles at the audacity of the thought.

“They’re not something you throw out if you use them,” I tell her angrily. “You replace them with the newest version. You don’t just toss it out on January first and just go obliviously through life until another one is printed.”

“Maybe a pay phone will have one,” Greg says optimistically as we pass a hotel that has been burned down for some time, but there’s a crater in the parking lot with dozens of scattered cars that leave an ominous feeling in the minds of all of us. That’s not something that you see just casually while you’re driving through a city.

“A pay phone?” I say, shaking my head. “You think that a phonebook is an archaic, stupid idea, but not a pay phone?”

“Yeah, there were pay phones all over campus,” Greg shrugs.

“Those were security phones to call campus security,” I shake my head again. “Pay phones have been ripped out of most cities thanks to cellphones. They only exist in areas of cities that are too poor to afford cellphones.”

“Everyone had a cellphone,” Lexi says all-knowingly.

“Who cares,” I snap, tired of talking about the world that once was. I’m more interested in what’s going on right now.

“Jesus.” Lexi bites onto the snap and gets a death grip on it. Shifting in the back seat, she acts like I’ve offended her greatly, typical Lexi stuff. “So once we get the phonebook, do we go looking for the supplies, or do we try to find out where Jason’s place is?”

“Jason’s house,” Greg corrects her.

“What? I thought it was a compound.” Lexi shakes her head. “How do you know it’s a house?”

“You dad said that it was a house,” Greg says with a certainty to his voice that makes me curious. For the life of me, I can’t remember what it was that my father said. Everything is such a blur, but Greg was there. He wasn’t nearly as emotional as I was in the event of my father’s death, so maybe he had more clarity about the whole thing than I do. I look over at him. I should trust him. Why wouldn’t I?

The mystery of Jason has been something that taunted me earlier on in our journey, but lately, the weight of death has stricken it from my mind. The idea that Jason’s place is going to be a sanctuary from all the evil that has taken over the world is a fairytale that I’m already bracing to find deflated and hollow. No, if anything, Jason might just be a man who can offer us shelter and supplies for a while as we all ponder the end of the world. I don’t think that he has the magical cure anymore. I don’t think that he has all the answers that my father had cryptically implied in his dying words. If anything, Jason is probably just a man who is surviving in the best comfort available. Save the world; I shake my head at the notion of it. That’s just a dream and this isn’t a place for dreams. This is a world of nightmares now.

I’m done with optimism. The odds are always against us and the fact that my father crossed the country and was in the condition that he was in doesn’t tell me that my father was lucky; it tells me that he was resourceful. It tells me that there’s no shelter or sanctuary out there. The fact that my father might have met a man named Jason with a miracle cure back when he crossed the country to find my sister and me, doesn’t mean that he still has it. If anything, he’s probably been overrun by unspeakable terrors and we’re going to find him besieged by religious fanatics or some other kind of cutthroats. I’m ready for anything at this point and I’m tired of having expectations and hopes that are crushed at every turn. From here on out, I’m done with being excited or hopeful for anything. I’m a slave to reality now and reality is a cruel, vengeful master.

We find the entrance to a subdivision that doesn’t look too exceptional. It’s one of those developments where it’s the same three different house floor plans, they just shifted the way they’re facing or painted them a different color when they were being built. It has the look of the kind of middle class housing that makes me confident that we’ll find what we’re looking for. One of these houses has to have a phonebook inside of it. I look at each of the houses, certain that the houses closest to the entrance of the subdivision will be more likely to have been thoroughly looted. Instead, we want the houses farther back, deeper into the development.

Passing a house that’s been burned to its core, I look at the abandoned cars, the leftover fingerprints of a world that used to be happy and nonchalant. Where did they all go? Where did everyone go? Are they all dead or monsters? I can’t imagine that those were the only two fates out there. There have to be some cunning and clever survivors out there, lurking in the ruins of civilization, waiting to see where the cards fall and how to pick up the pieces. We can’t be all there is.

“Load everything we have,” I say over my shoulder softly as we slow down.

The truck is rumbling, sputtering, and clanking as it drives through the streets of the subdivision, so surprise is definitely not going to be on our side, but at least there are no obvious signs that there are those shuffling corpses anywhere. The thought of running into another pack of those things makes me nauseous, so I put it as far away from my mind as I can. I don’t want to think about it. I don’t want to think about what we can’t overcome, and another wave of those horrors is definitely something we won’t be able to survive.

“We’re running low on pretty much everything,” Lexi says with a confidence that troubles me. We should have been smarter. We should have tried to salvage the truck that my father had driven across the country in, the one he stole from the religious zealots back in Atlanta. That truck had been higher, sturdier, and we might have gotten through Atlanta with more of our supplies if we’d had that truck. “Just a few rounds in everything.”

“It’ll be enough,” I tell her, trying to match her confidence. “We’re almost there. We only have a little farther to go. We just have to make every shot count.”

“Don’t fire until you see the whites of their eyes,” Greg chuckles.

“Get a grip, asshole,” Lexi growls at him, less tolerant of his delirium than I am. Her coldness is off-putting to me. It makes me want to turn on her and open a Pandora’s Box of questions that I feel need to be addressed, like how she sleeps at night with the way she so carelessly threw aside her boyfriend in the face of his death or how she’s okay with keeping an entire pregnancy secret from me over the last year. Right now, it’s not the time for me to bring down the righteous hammer of God on her, but I’m more than willing to lift it.

Instead of going down that road, I look at the houses that are here for our choosing and I don’t like the looks of any of them. Dust has piled up on all of the lawns and the rain has turned it into clay, cementing everything that was under the lawn to their graves. I can see debris poking up out of the parched earth and all I can think of is that this place has been hit hard. The garages are all open, the doors thrown wide, and the windows shattered. From the debris and the dark holes welcoming us into their hidden traps and ambushes, I decide that this subdivision is a dead end. We’ve been wasting our entire time here. I drive out of the subdivision while the two not driving bicker and argue about what they should conserve their ammunition for.

Pushing north, closer and closer to Dayton, I find another subdivision in a matter of minutes that looks more promising, but what attracts my attention is not something that I’m overly thrilled about. The sight of three, shuffling zombies draws my eye and the fact that they’re out on the street means that the subdivision hasn’t been cleansed by raiders or scavengers. Zombies are a sort of marker for no-man’s-land and I hone in on them. So long as there isn’t a pack of those things in the subdivision, we’ll be just fine. As we drive down the street, the zombies shuffle, turning their tilted heads toward the sounds of the hobbling truck. Their wide eyes and filthy faces stare at us with curiosity. I’m certain that they’re blind. Passing them, I can feel the silence and terror wafting off of Greg and Lexi like smoke.

Passing another street, we see more of the zombies, but my suspicions about them being mostly blind seems more and more like the truth. They’re staring up at the sun as they stand there, waiting for something to trigger their attention while they sway and stare patiently. There are three in this group as well and as we drive past them, I watch as Greg grips his shotgun with nervous precaution.

I’d toyed with the idea of parking the truck and searching the subdivisions on foot, trying to conserve whatever gas we have in the tank and the last gas can in the back for an emergency, but as we pass a cul-de-sac with two more zombies lingering around a dead car, I feel very grateful that we didn’t. A single gunshot will bring all of those things down around us, drawn to us like wolves circling a campfire. I don’t relish the idea of being out here on foot with all the creatures, but the truck does have its drawbacks. Looking over my shoulder, past Lexi, I can see the nearest pack shuffling toward us, their eyes wide with curiosity.

I bring the truck to a stop outside of a house that I’ve designated as our first target. We’re right in the middle of an intersection between four houses, a perfect spot to start looking. This is where we’ll take our first steps in the direction of finding exactly what we’ve come here looking for. I’m going to find a phonebook. I’m going to find Jason’s home, medical supplies for Greg, and I’m going to do it all with a level of heroics that no human has ever seen, and I’m not going to give a damn about anyone that I come across. I’m tired of people between me and my destination. They’ve all forfeited the right to live in my opinion. They all deserve to die. If they stand between me and my goals, they’re no more to me than a stepping stone.

“I’m on point,” Greg declares as he leans forward, gripping his shotgun with a disturbingly loose grip. If he squeezes the trigger, the shotgun is going to blow out of his hands like he’s in a cartoon.

“No, you’re not,” I tell him sternly. “You’re staying here with Charlie and you’re going to watch out for us. You’re covering us on this one.”

“Like hell I am,” Greg says with a laughingly distraught look on his face.

“Greg, you’re delirious,” I remind him. “You can’t run, you can hardly walk, and you are no good to us in there if we find something waiting for us. We need you to stay out here behind the wheel, watching out for us. Okay?”

Reason sinks into his thick skull and I can see the comprehension washing over his face. I look back at Charlie who is wrapped up tightly and still asleep. I’m thankful that he’s a sleepy baby. He hardly wakes up, mostly when he wants to feed and then goes right back to sleep. It’ll be harder when he gets older, but hopefully by then we’ll all be in the safety of Jason’s compound or house, or whatever’s waiting for us at the edge of Dayton. Greg pushes open his door and makes his way around the truck as I look back at Lexi.

“Are you ready for this?” I ask her, worried that she’ll be too afraid to leave Charlie behind.

“Let’s do this,” she says, deflating all of my worries about her maternal instincts.

“Okay,” I say, opening my door gently, not wanting to knock over wobbly Greg as he hobbles around the door, leaning on the truck for his support. “Stay safe,” I warn him as I help him into the driver’s seat behind the wheel. He just offers me a smile that doesn’t foster any confidence inside of me. I’m wondering how I’m expecting him to drive in his state. “Here are the keys,” I say, handing them to him. He takes them and nods again.

Lexi leads the way across the street to the first house. Chambering a round, I count four bullets inside of my Sig, which makes me extremely nervous. If we find any sort of trouble, that’s not a lot of help. It’s more than a club or a stick, but I’m still worried about our chances in a close call. Lexi takes the porch, staring at the shut door as I come up behind her, quickly taking the stairs, not worried about the creaking boards. If there’s anyone hiding inside of the house, it certainly doesn’t have the look of it. Many of the windows are shattered and I can see the curtains wafting inside, tattered and molding.