The Undead World (Book 2): The Apocalypse Survivors (13 page)

Chapter 13

Sarah

The Center for Disease Control, Atlanta, Georgia

Eve’s pudgy, dimpled knees locked, then unlocked. They locked again with a snap, like a tiny, soft robot coming awake suddenly. They then wavered, jiggled, and finally trembled with the strain of holding up her seventeen pounds. In the end she plopped onto her diapered butt.

Undeterred she again reached for the end of the coffee table. This attempt, her third, ended with her chin clipping the table and her eyes filling with tears.

Sarah waited to say anything. She paused in mid-crouch, fighting the normal motherly instinct to pick-up her baby and clutch her to her bosom and soothe. As always, it was a struggle to remain cold and calculating. No matter the extent of Eve’s “injuries” Sarah forced herself to barely react.

She waited as her tiny daughter made little pouty sounds. Ten seconds elapsed and then Eve again reached for the corner of the table once more.

“I’m doing the right thing,” Sarah
told herself, despite that it did not feel right in the least. Rather it felt like the “man” thing. It was how her ex-husband had always done things with regard to Brittany, Sarah’s first child.

“
She’ll be fine
.” This had been a veritable catch phrase of his for Brit’s first three years.

“Sometimes she wasn’t fine, Stew,” Sarah said to the room, still feeling the anger after all the years that had passed.

Eve looked back at her, fat tears, near perfect in their symmetry sat on her lashes; one for each eye. “What a big girl you are,” Sarah told her new daughter, in hushed tones. The new world with its new rules dictated that she not be overly effusive.

Sarah hated it. She hated that Eve wasn’t allowed to cry. A few tears were ok; whimpering was alright, depending on the situation, but crying was just plain wrong
. And bawling? Bawling was strictly forbidden. Sadly, so was laughter. Sarah could envision the playground of the future: a perfectly oiled merry-go-round whispering by as the children, sitting upright in the saddles of their garishly painted ponies, did little more than grin at their parents or wave with a shy hand. If there was laughter, it would be a soft heh-heh.

There’d be no more peals of laughter. No more excited whoops! Definitely screeching with the sheer joy of life wouldn’t be allowed, and if there was ever a skinned knee
, the poor child would just have to deal with it...quietly.

“You’re a tough little soldier, aren’t you Eve,” Sarah said with a grim smile. Just like all of it, she hated using those words, despite that they were necessary words. It was a dangerous time to be a baby
, or to even have a baby. Even behind guarded walls it was dangerous, because who knew what the future held? Stronger walls had fallen already and better soldiers had been overcome. Eve had to be ready for anything.

S
ince they were pioneers of sorts, she and Neil had carefully thought out their parenting strategy. They were setting the standard for all other parents to emulate—not that there were many. Of the twenty-one hundred souls left at the CDC there were eight children below the age of thirteen, with Eve being the only one below the age of seven. Nor were there many babies on the way; a mere handful. Women were rightly afraid to get pregnant—for themselves and their future babies.

No one understood this better than Sarah. She dreaded the idea of stepping a single foot beyond the walls and slept horribly whenever Neil and Sadie ventured out.

“They’re going to be fine,” she said, partially to Eve, but mostly to herself. “Daddy and big sis are going to be just fine.” She hoped. Sarah didn’t think she could raise Eve alone. It was labor intensive being so attentive, striving for the perfect mix of love, freedom, and safety. It was also a joy, even compared to raising Brit.

Back
in the old days it was considered normal to hand your two-month old baby off to a nanny or some local lady with a houseful of brats. At the most people kept a child until pre-school and sometimes pre-pre-school if there was a government program in place—Head Start or some such that did little beside destroy the concept of motherhood.

Sarah ha
dn’t looked at it like that, not back then. Instead she had some fool notion that it was
so
important to work outside of the home, as if the world wouldn’t continue to turn with one less pharmaceutical rep in high-heels and a short skirt pushing her pills. She now knew the truth. She was a fool no longer. The truth was that she had one overriding obligation and that was to parent her child, to be a mom. Everything else in her life was secondary.

“Oh, Brit,” she whispered, picturing her beautiful daughter. At the sound of Sarah’s voice Eve looked back at her. She had one lit
tle fist shoved knuckle deep in her mouth; her chin was aglaze with drool. “Yeah, Sweetums. Mommy messed up with your big sister. I wasn’t a good mom. That’s the truth. I was a part time mom—nights and weekends only.”

Nights, when Brit was asleep. Weekends, when she was off with friends.

“And that’s why she’s dead,” Sarah went on, feeling depression begin to creep over her mind. “Brittany’s dead because I was only around when she wasn’t. What kind of mother is that?”

At the question, Eve jiggled head to toe, sat down with a light thump and then released gas like a conversational duck:
quack, quack, quack
. Just like that the spell of gloom departed from Sarah and she smiled. Eve smiled back, but just for a second. She then took on a faraway look, as if she were considering the geo-political ramifications of zombie migratory patterns. Her face slowly turned red until she lit up her diaper with an eye-watering stink.

“Are you saying I was a shitty mother?” Sarah asked with a shake of her head.

Eve replied: “Da-da.” Her only real word.

“He’ll be back in a few days and as much as I’d like for him to change that toxic waste filled diaper of yours, I’d be a bad mom…again, if I did.
Wait here.” Before dashing back to the master bedroom, where the extra diapers were kept, Sarah gave a last glance at the living room to make sure there wasn’t anything Eve could stuff into her mouth and choke on.

“I hope you’re almost ready for a nap
Evey-poo,” Sarah said from the hall. “Because mommy is…”

She stopped in mid-stride as a wailing sound started up from outside the apartment. It was a confusing sound, mainly because it was a new sound…or rather it was an old sound from the old days, and one she hadn’t heard in years and
hadn’t expected to ever hear again. It was an air raid warning. Any alarm, by definition, was supposed to be alarming and yet this one was doubly so. Up and down it went with growing urgency in its mechanical voice.

Turning on the spot, Sarah raced back to the living room to stare with wide worried eyes out the window. The sky was a perfect robin’s egg blue
, unblemished by a single contrail—the telltale sign of an inbound jet. And this was perfectly normal; exactly what any sane person would expect. After all this wasn’t London during the Blitz. There weren’t German Heinkels overhead dropping bombs.

Then what was the siren all about?

“Could be an accident,” she commented. “Or a prank.” She turned back to the task at hand, changing a diaper, though she did so with a troubled heart. This time she decided to keep Eve close and so scooped her up and took her to the bedroom. There she put the baby on the bed where Eve immediately grabbed her own toes—she knew what was coming.

“
Da-da. Ba-dah, ba, ba,” she babbled, her blue eyes going round in her head with the warble of the siren.

Sarah sped through the re-diapering without answering her daughter; she was too preoccupied with the siren and her growing fear. Why hadn’t it stopped? Why did they let it go on and on? It had been over three minutes now and was driving her bonkers…

“Hey,” Sarah exclaimed, relieved. Finally, the siren had stopped. “That’s a whole lot better.” She straightened Eve’s pink dress and was just about to pick her up when she caught the sound of a more distant, or perhaps a more muffled alarm that had been buried by the siren. It was a repetitious:
meep, meep, meep
.

“Come on, Sweetie,” Sarah said,
buckling her holstered Berretta around her waist and then hitching Eve to her hip. The gun was reassuring, as was the view from her window: clear blue skies, the football field of Emory University that sat across the road properly empty, and the distant grey/green haze of Georgia in the spring. There wasn’t a zombie in sight. So what was with this new alarm?

In just under two minutes, Sarah
zipped down to street level and found the main avenue of the CDC compound clogged with people. Judging by the numbers she was the last one to see what the fuss was about.

“Sarah!” A woman pushed her way through the crowd. It was
Shondra Davis. She was new to the CDC and like most people, very much alone in the world. After spending the winter holed up in Birmingham, starving and watching as her family and friends were killed one after another by the endless zombie attacks, she had finally decided to make a run for her life. Only by luck had she come east to the CDC. During her ordeal, she not only lost every person she had ever cared about, she had also lost over a hundred and fifty pounds. Her skin was the color bark and had the consistency of a bloodhound’s cheeks.

Shondra
threw her flappy arms about Sarah and hugged both her and Eve. “Oh, it’s bad. It’s bad, isn’t it?” she asked, her brown jowls all aquiver. The same sort of worried question riddled the crowd.

“I don’t know,” Sarah replied, trying to see over the taller woman. “I don’t even know what’s happening.” As far as she could tell, nothing was happening. The alarm seemed to be drifting
up out of the depths of the main CDC lab, from which people scurried, looking back as they did, as if something was after them.

“I guess no one does,”
Shondra said. She hadn’t moved to relinquish her hold on Sarah.

A man in front tur
ned around and said in a thick Alabama accent, “They may-could have stiffs up in there. You know, to do speariments on. I betcha some got out and are eatin’ everyone in sight.”

“Would they make this much ruckus
over a few stiffs?” another asked. He was a tall stick of a fellow with radar dish ears and a web of wrinkles around his eyes. He answered his own question, “I really doubt it.”

The man from Alabama gave him a sneer and asked, “Since y’all so smart,
Ein-stein, what do y’all figger it is?”

“Germs,” he answered, hushing the crowd with his one word answer. “That there is the CDC. It’s where they keep all the germs. My guess it wasn’t no zombies what got out. It’s the germs what got out.”

Chapter 14

Neil

Ola, Georgia

“Nothing! Only more dead ends,” Mark grumbled, kicking open the screen door with a bang and stepping out of the house. As Sadie had mentioned, on
many
occasions, he was a strapping young man; beneath his weight the weathered boards of the wraparound porch groaned.

Irritated by the noise and the whining, Neil followed him out, rolling his eyes behind Mark’s back. “At least it wasn’t picked over,” Neil said. “It should give us some hope that we’ll find a good house around here somewhere.”

The bigger man turned just as he was about to go down the steps and shook his head so that his brown hair swung in his eyes; his hair was long even by apocalypse standards—another strike against him in Neil's mind. “That’s completely fuckery!" Mark exclaimed, flipping his head back to clear his eyes. "The truth is the exact opposite. The fact that the house
wasn’t
picked over and was still useless means…I don’t know what. But it’s all fucked. I mean, where’s the damned food?”

“Eaten,” Neil said, simply. He was too tired to be as animated as Mark over things he couldn't change. “Whoever lived here ate all of it, down to the last saltine. But that doesn’t mean there weren’t homes that were broken into by the stiffs. Those homes might be packed with all sorts of stuff.”

“And they might not. Shit! We’re wasting our time.”

“Mark, calm down, please,” Sadie said. She had been on guard outside and she pointed to a few zombies headed their way. They were on a somewhat secluded street, in a small town that was midway between the rural life of the country and the last vestiges of suburbia
. The homes were large and further apart, but there were still plenty of them. More than enough to house zombies in numbers that they didn’t want to tussle with.

Mark glanced at the stiffs and then snorted in derision.

Neil, however took them in with an experienced eye, judging the difficulty of killing them without getting bit or scratched. They were whole and healthy, and walked quicker than the average, which wasn’t good. “Sadie, come on up here. The porch steps will stymie them long enough for us to put them out of their misery.”

“I swear I don’t get you, Neil,” Mark said with a bit of a smile, relaxing somewhat. “Whoever uses a word like
stymie
? And what misery? Those fuckers are the ones causing all the misery.”

Not for the first time Neil glanced to Sadie, wearing a look that made it clear he couldn’t understand what she saw in him. She caught the look, smiled thinly and came up the steps to wait for the zombies to arrive.

Neil killed them one after another—the steps did indeed flummox them so that their deaths were not particularly difficult. Though he did get some black blood on his sleeve. “There’s probably a better way to do this,” he said, wiping his light jacket on the long grass of the front yard.

“There is,” Mark said. “It’s called using a fucking gun.”

“I said a
better
way, Mark. Not a way to have every zombie in a five mile radius coming down on us.”

Sadie skipped down the stairs, intentionally ignoring the corpses as she always did. “Maybe you can use
my baseball bat. There’d be less blood. I hate the blood the most. It’s so gross.”

“A bat is not such a sure thing when it comes to killing them,” Neil replied. “Some have heads like granite.”
And it hurts my hands
, he didn't add, not wanting to appear wimpy around Mark.

With his bloody axe resting on his shoulder, he stood thinking on the subject of killing zombies. He hated the blood as well. After every killing he would fastidiously inspect his skin and clothes to make sure he hadn’t been splattered. But it was not the actual killing that had him thinking on the subject. It was the danger in killing.

Slaying zombies quietly in close quarter combat was a fairly hazardous undertaking. One slip of the hands or one accidental trip could mean a very bad death. Neil had tried using a bow and arrow with very poor results. Part of this was due to his lack of skill, however the way a zombie lurched in an unpredictable manner meant a head shot—a real killing headshot—wasn’t going to be easy for anyone.

“Let's see, you don’t like guns or axes or bats,” Mark said, counting on his fingers with the mention of each different weapon. “I would suggest a spear, only I’m thinking that would be too icky for you as well. Maybe you should try putting them in
time-out
.”

This actually triggered a thought in Neil, despite the flippancy of the remark. However, the thought went out the window when Mark continued in falsetto: “
You naughty, naughty zombie. If you won’t eat all your brains, it’ll be the corner for you! And this time I mean it
.”

Sadie forced out an uncomfortable laugh and tried to change the subject, “So, where are we going to spend the night? Not here I hope. That front door looks rickety as hell.”

Neil thought for sure Mark would make some braggadocios comment, however, the younger man agreed that the house wasn’t suitable.

They moved on. It was late in the afternoon and the sun was dropping out of the sky when they found a place to encamp. It was a rectangle of a home hidden from the world by great moping willows. Compared to the elegant estates of south Atlanta, it was hardly more formal in its architecture tha
n a doghouse and yet it appealed immediately.

The previous owner
s had gone to great lengths to preserve its integrity. The windows and doors were fortified, boarded over with inch-thick plywood and barred with steel to keep out the undead. Still, the hard work had not saved them.

The little group found the bodies of an elderly couple in an upstairs bedroom. They were wizened like old apples and not just from the length of their internment.

“I think they starved to death,” Neil said after inspecting the kitchen. Though there were a few spices, everything else had been eaten, up to and including a large bag of dog food. Of the dog there was no sign and Neil had the uncomfortable thought that it had been eaten as well.

Sadie looked pained at the idea of the pair dying of starvation and said, “But they have a pond just out back. I saw like three fish jump in the last minute.”

“Yeah, and did you see the woods all around?” Mark asked. He had grown quieter as the murk of evening settled in. “You might have seen three fish but I saw about fifty stiffs. They’re prowling all up in the woods.”

The night passed without incident, though it was a hard burden to hear the fish jump and splash in the pond throughout the evening hours. Neil dreamt of fish—of catching them, of coo
king them, of eating them. The thought of fish filled his mind almost straight through the night. In the morning he stood at the back window, watching the fish do their thing as the pale dawn ate up the mists.

“I’m going to catch one,” he vowed. They had fishing poles, which was good, and lures, which wasn’t. At best Neil was a subpar fisherman and with lures he was worse than that. His only success had been with bait. The problem was that they didn’t have any—though he knew where to find some.

“Can you get a fire going, Sadie," he asked, "And Mark, if you’ll cover me?”

Mark looked at him skeptically. “You’re going out there?” The morning was so new that the zombies hadn’t yet retreated into the dim of the forests.

“Yes. Just for a little while. All you have to do is keep them off of me for a couple short minutes.”

They were some of the longest minutes of his life. With a plastic container in one hand, a trowel in the other, and Mark just behind him, Neil darted out the back door and ran to where a canoe sat with a goodly amount of brackish water floating in the bottom. With a grunt
he upended the thing and then scrambled about after the insects retreating from the light.

He grabbed three black beetles, a centipede as long as his pinky, and two huge worms that stretched as he pulled—one snapped in half; he kept it anyway. Next he went to a flat rock, however, before he could flip it over an explosion broke the still air and echoed like rolling thunder.

“Jeeze!” Neil cried. A single zombie had come shuffling from around the house and now it lay on the ground with half its head gone.

“You wanted me to cover you,” Mark said with a shrug. "What did you expect?"

“To kill them quietly if you could,” Neil answered. As evidence by the swaying trees and the crashing footfalls from the nearby forest, the time for quiet was past. Neil flipped the rock, grabbed all the bugs he could and then ran for the house, holding his left ear against the drum-shattering explosions of Mark’s 50 caliber handgun, a Taurus
Raging Bull 500
.

“Did you see that fucker’s head come apart?” Mark asked giddily once they were inside. “It was awesome!”

“Yeah, it was great,” Neil said, poking beetles back into the bucket. “I hope this is enough.”

Sadie, who had been watching from the door instead of starting the fire, glanced into the bucket and asked, “Enough for what? You can’t go back out there, especially not to go fishing. I saw like a hundred of them. They’re all over the place.”

“I’ll be fine. It’s Mark you should worry about.”

Mark stopped in the middle of topping off the load in his hand-cannon. “If you think I’m going to go fishing with all those fuckers out there, you’re crazy.”

“No, I'm going to be the one fishing,” Neil said, checking his pole, making sure that the bobber was set a good two feet above the weighted hook. “I just need you to back the Rover down to the pond. I’m going to fish from on top of the roof. I’ll be fine. No zombie can climb up there, not with the big tires you got on her.”

“What about me?” Mark asked. “There were some big stiffs out there. The glass won’t hold.” Car windows were strong enough to repel the smaller weaker zombies, but against the larger ones, it was just a matter of time before they broke through. “Did you think of that, Smart-guy?”

“I did. You’ll drape yourself in a sheet…”

“What? That won’t fool them!”

Neil fished out one of the beetles. “They won’t even notice you. They’re going to be looking at me like the cherry on an ice-cream sundae. Just don’t move around a lot and stay hidden; you’ll be fine.”

The plan worked like a charm. The pond brimmed with so many stocked fish that Neil hauled in
three bass and two good sized sunnies before he ran out of bait. Not that it was easy. Standing atop the Range Rover, exposed with throngs of zombies stretching out their arms to him made him feel like a rock-star in hell. The zombies even moaned and swayed to an unheard beat.

W
ith his fish in a bucket, Neil tapped on the roof and Mark nearly sent him tumbling among his hungry fans by flooring the Rover. He just managed to hold on for the short trip around to the front of the house where they ran for the door before the stiffs could catch up.

The three
of them ate till their stomachs were stretched and uncomfortable. "I wish I knew the first thing about how to smoke fish," Neil said, picking his teeth with a bass-bone. "I know Sarah likes fish a lot."

"It can't be that hard," Sadie said, but didn't offer any more thoughts on the subject. Her eyes were glassy from the big meal.

Despite the desire to nap, the three forced themselves up and, after a sprint to the Rover, they went on looking for the right homes to ransack. It was a long, dangerous day investigating them. The zombies were like ants to a picnic—every time they stopped, out they would come. Sometimes they came in ones or two, while at other times they seemed to form marching lines. Once the three sat trapped in an upstairs bathroom of a trashy redneck bi-level for two hours until the horde broke up.

And just like the day before Mark followed a similar pattern. In the morning he made rude jokes, mostly jibes at Neil; in the afternoon he grew restless and agitated and just as dark threatened he'd become quiet and somewhat withdrawn. The third day was much the same. They had only planned for a three day trip, however they were on such a bad streak that they had barely filled two boxes with canned goods and a third with other essentials: candles, spices, bottled water. They decided that a fourth day was in order despite knowing that Sarah would be worried sick.

In the old days it would've been only a couple hour trip back, now it was a whole other story. Not only were many of the roads and bridges impassible, they couldn't afford the gas to go back to the CDC; fuel was another essential that they were struggling to locate.

That fourth day started with another attempt at fishing, unfortunately Sadie insisted on getting a turn and through her inexperience the girl from Hoboken managed to waste all the bait and lose three hooks. Two strange looking and stranger tasting fish was all she had to show for two hours of sitting on top of the Rover.

For once Mark needled her instead of Neil. She accepted the jokes in an embarrassed silence while Neil glowered. He was somewhat used to being made fun of, but he'd never had a loved one made fun of before and it made him far more angry than he thought it could have. It wasn't something he could laugh away or let roll off his back. Breakfast that morning was a hushed angry affair because of it.

Luckily success smoothed over any tensions as they happened upon a jackpot of a home. Jackpot being a relative term
, they managed to fill half the rover: four boxes of canned goods, two scoped rifles with three hundred rounds of ammo, fourteen gallons of gas, and finally the greatest prize: two bags of flour and another of sugar.