It always took me a little longer than the average person to get close to someone. I was the quiet one in a group of friends, reserved and shy, a far better listener than I was a talker. I was the girl people came to with their problems, not the girl who dumped her own problems on everyone else. I didn’t like talking about myself. To my friends, I was the nice girl, the friend you could count on, the shoulder you could cry on, the problem-solver. With the exception of Shawn and a few others, I felt like I understood them better than they understood me.
In many ways, my role here is the same. I calm, and I comfort. I listen, and I help. But you can’t experience something like we have with a group of people and not get close to them. You have to open up to each other. You have to understand each other. You have to trust each other and depend on each other. And so I have, and I do.
I’ve shared more of myself with these people than I did most of my old friends from my old life, and in just a matter of weeks, I’ve grown closer to them than anyone but my own family. In this new life, they are my family.
You see, when humanity dies, you cling to what remnants are left. You don’t hold back; you hold on tight, and you never let them go.
Wednesday, April 18, 2012
7:00 a.m.
Gretchen breathed a sigh of relief when she opened her eyes to see a crack of faint light filtering beneath the door to the back room. Another dark night over – at last, it was dawn.
She sat up, feeling groggy and stiff, her bones cracking as she picked herself up from the pile of thin blankets she’d spread across the tiled floor. The blankets were identical, purple, with “Union County Tigers” spelled out in gold lettering – merchandise for the local high school’s athletics program, no doubt. They were the only blankets she and Brian had been able to find in the gas station, tucked away in a corner behind a sparse rack of t-shirts. They’d taken all that was left and used it to pad the floor, but Gretchen was still feeling it, after spending the night there. Bruised ribs were only a part of it; her body was simply not the same, at thirty, as it had been at thirteen, when she’d had no problem curling up in her sleeping bag on the thinnest of carpets and dropping right off to sleep. She had slept poorly last night, waking every hour upon the hour, it seemed, though she had no way of knowing the time for sure.
Of course, the zombies were as much to blame as the uncomfortable sleeping conditions. It was hard to sleep soundly, knowing that they prowled restlessly outside the station, fearing that they would find a way in while she slept. If Brian had not been there, she doubted she’d have been able to relax enough to fall asleep at all.
She and Brian had been sleeping in shifts, trading off between lying on the makeshift bed of blankets and sitting up at the small table and chairs, the only furniture in the back room. He had chivalrously offered her the bed on the first night, volunteering to take the night shift of guard duty and sleep during the day. Gretchen was grateful. Though she’d never feared the dark before, she wasn’t sure her sanity could take sitting up alone all night in pitch blackness, as Brian did, listening to the muffled scraped and moans of the undead outside.
She looked up and found him slouched in the hard-backed chair, his elbow on the table, propping his chin in his hand. As her eyes adjusted to the receding darkness, she saw that his were bloodshot and glazed; he seemed to stare right through the barricaded door without seeing. Gretchen cleared her throat quietly and whispered, “Morning.”
Even though she’d tried not to startle him, Brian jumped in his seat. He recovered quickly, though, and looked down at her. “Mornin’,” he rasped back, managing a lopsided smile that didn’t reach his bleary eyes. Neither of them bothered to preface it with a “good.” There had not been any “good” mornings since Friday.
She struggled to figure out how many days it had been since then. There was Saturday, the day she’d spent alone in the house with the power out, waiting for word from Shawn. That was the last time she’d heard his voice, she thought, and the realization made her heart skip a beat. Don’t think that way, she scolded herself. Of course you haven’t heard from him since then; the phone service is down. How would he reach you? But he’s fine, he’s got to be fine, and eventually…
But she couldn’t finish the thought. How would Shawn find her, eventually? She still hadn’t figured that out and had been contemplating telling Brian that when they got out of this place, she was turning around and going back to Georgia, back to her home. It was the only place she could think to meet Shawn, or at least leave a message for him. But she would have to find a way out of the gas station first.
How many days had it been? She returned to her former train of thought. After Saturday came Sunday, and that was the morning she’d awoken when it was still dark and found the zombies outside her house, the morning she’d picked up Brian. They had been traveling together ever since then… but how long?
They’d spent Sunday night in the farmhouse, and on Monday, they had started driving again and run out of gas and ended up here, at the gas station. Blowing up the pumps had killed off most of the zombies who had forced them in there, but even once the blaze had died down and it should have been safe to come out, it wasn’t. More of them had appeared, attracted by the sound and the light of the flames, no doubt. The fire had acted as a beacon for them, something neither she, nor Brian, had anticipated.
Clearly, the movies were wrong: the living dead had no fear of fire. They feared nothing, for they had no feelings, no thoughts or emotions. They were not like animals, acting on instinct, for even animals showed fear. Animals had feelings and needs, just as human beings did. But there was nothing human, animal, or alive about the undead. They were more like robots, terminators, cold and unfeeling, programmed only to destroy and deadest on fulfilling their duty.
Unlike the Terminator, they had no technology and no problem-solving abilities. If she and Brian were being pursued by the Terminator, they’d have been dead the first day, but instead, they’d survived through Monday… Tuesday…
That meant today had to be Wednesday. They’d been trapped in the gas station two full days and nights, securely barricaded in – so far – but unable to come out. The whole place was surrounded by the living dead, and Gretchen knew if they dared venture outside, they would be attacked and killed in mere seconds. Even with guns, there were simply too many of them to take on. She wasn’t willing to risk it.
The station wasn’t exactly comfortable, but for the time being, it would do. It was secure enough, especially there in the back room, and it had enough supplies to live on for at least a few weeks – not that they planned on being there that long. There was bottled water and other drinks, plenty of snacks, batteries for their flashlights, and a working bathroom. When they’d first emerged from the back room to check on the fire and found the grounds teaming with new zombies, they had rounded up enough supplies to last a couple of days and holed up in the back room again, barricading themselves in once more. They’d been there ever since, sneaking out only to make trips to the tiny bathroom and check on the zombie situation outside.
Wondering if there’d been any change in that situation overnight, Gretchen asked Brian, “Anything new?”
He shook his head. “It’s been quiet, ‘cept for the moanin’. Did ya sleep?”
She shrugged. “Off and on.”
“What you wouldn’t give for a bed, eh?” A faint smile passed over his lips.
She returned the smile. “Oh yeah.”
They’d made small talk like this over the past couple of days, in the few hours they were both awake at the same time. Gretchen found Brian easy enough to talk to when they were planning or just chitchatting like this. He seemed mild-mannered and sweet, and she imagined that, under different circumstances, he would have been quite charming. But there were shadows behind his light blue eyes, a darkness, a sadness that she suspected had not been there a week ago. Whatever he had been through before she’d come across him on the roadside that morning, whatever he had experienced when the undead rose, it still haunted him in a way that surpassed her own nightmarish memories. Whenever their conversations turned to more personal matters, he shied away, shut down, and silence ensued.
Gretchen was running out of things to talk about. She had never been particularly skilled in the art of making conversation; she depended on others to keep the chatter going. She wasn’t one to talk endlessly about herself, either, yet in this case, she felt she had shared much more of her own life with Brian than he had in return. She still didn’t know much more about him personally than the few details she’d learned during the car ride that first day, and that troubled her. She was depending on a man she barely knew.
“So, mattress or waterbed?”
Brian blinked, caught off-guard. “Huh?”
“You know… what kind of bed do you sleep in?” probed Gretchen, smiling. “Are you a mattress guy or a waterbed guy?”
“Oh… waterbed, I guess. I mean, I used to be. Bought my first waterbed for fifty bucks at a garage sale once.” He grinned. “But I’ve just got a regular bed at home, now. Not just regular, I guess – it’s huge. My wife…” But he trailed off, and his grin faded. “Well… it’s a king-size,” he finished lamely.
“Sounds nice,” said Gretchen. She wanted to ask him about his wife, but was afraid to pry. She knew how it felt to be asked about things you weren’t ready to talk about. She knew how it felt to just want to shut down – and shut out everyone else, too. She also knew it felt better when you finally opened up and let them in, hard as it was to do. “Ours is just a regular mattress, too. It’s a queen. I’ve got this down mattress topper, though, and that makes it really soft and squishy… You just sink down into it, like a cloud. I’d kill for that thing right about now…” she moaned wistfully, getting up to stretch out her stiff body. Maybe Brian wasn’t ready to let her in yet.
His grin returned. “I bet you would. And if it was a zombie you killed, you’d be killin’ two birds with one stone.”
“Two zombies, you mean.” Gretchen grinned, and Brian chuckled appreciatively. “So… headboard or no?”
“No. You?”
“Headboard. One pillow or two?”
“Two.”
“Same. Comforter or bedspread?”
“What’s the difference?”
Gretchen laughed. “A bedspread is longer, but thinner. A comforter is thicker and warmer, but doesn’t hang as long on the sides.”
“Comforter, then. Definitely.”
“Me too. Except when you have a cover hog for a spouse. Or, in the case of my husband, one who gets hot and throws his heavy legs and big feet on top of the comforter so that you can’t even pull it out from under him in order to hog,” huffed Gretchen, though she was filled with longing for Shawn and his big feet and warm body. Where was he right now? Was he safe? Alive? He had to be… wherever he was. She couldn’t think otherwise.
“My wife was the cover hog in our family,” Brian replied. Again, a ghost of a smile appeared and then vanished. The past tense confirmed what she’d already suspected about his wife.
“Yeah… I guess I was, too.” Gretchen offered her own fleeting smile. Again, she considered asking… and this time, decided to go for it. “What happened to her?” she asked quietly. “Did she…?” She didn’t know the most sensitive way to word the second question, so she left it unfinished.
Brian pressed his lips together into a thin line. His nostrils flared as he sucked in a deep breath. He glanced once toward the ceiling and then down at the floor. For a few seconds, Gretchen thought he wasn’t going to answer, but then he said, “Yes – same as everyone else, I guess. She got sick. She passed. She… reanimated.”
He closed his eyes completely on the last word, as Gretchen drew in a sharp breath. She wasn’t sure why that last part shocked her – hadn’t they all reanimated? But “they” were all strangers to her. Even her neighbor, lying in the street – she hadn’t even known his name. She had not had to see any of her loved ones die and come back, for she had been all alone. Up until now, she had pitied herself over this, wishing for Shawn, but now she wondered if she hadn’t been lucky her husband had left before it all happened.
She looked now at Brian, whose eyes were squeezed shut, his lips pursed so tightly, they were lined in white. “I’m… so sorry…” she whispered, knowing it was lame and cliché, not knowing what else to say to him.
“She chased me into our bathroom,” Brian went on. She could see the emotion in his face, but his voice was flat, utterly void of it. Yet it trembled slightly, and she knew he was fighting hard just to get the words out. He didn’t have to, but it seemed that now he’d started to talk, he wanted to keep going, or rather, needed to keep going. “I put the towel bar through her skull. I killed her. My own wife…” A tear slipped out from beneath his eyelid, and he took a shuddering breath that sniffled in his nose and rattled down his windpipe.
Gretchen listened in increasing horror to the story, but tried to mask her revulsion, wanting to give him comfort and understanding. “She was already dead,” she whispered, all the while knowing her logic wouldn’t ease his pain. Emotions were just more powerful than logic. “You did what you had to. You did what was best for her. You freed her.”
He exhaled through his nose, shaking his head slowly. “That’s what I told myself I was doing, when I… when I killed my own daughters.”
Again, Gretchen tried to hide her shock, but couldn’t conceal it completely this time. He had never mentioned having children, and now she knew why. “Oh, Brian…” she whispered, her hand poised near her lips, her heart breaking for him. “I… I can’t imagine…”
He opened his eyes, and the moisture in them made them glisten, vividly blue, both tragic and beautiful. “They were just seven years old,” he said, and his voice quivered worse than ever. The deadened quality had left it, and it was brimming with emotion now. “Twins. Identical. Blue eyes… blonde hair, like my wife. They were so beautiful… like little angels, people always said.” He sniffed and wiped his nose with the back of his hand. “Want to see them?”
“You have pictures?” Gretchen asked hopefully. She was hopeful for his sake, not hers. To her, they would be just pictures. To him, they would be precious memories, irreplaceable and invaluable.
He rose from his chair and dug into the back pocket of the jeans he’d taken from the farmhouse. They were baggy on him, at least a size too big for his narrow waist, but he’d secured them with a leather belt. From them, he withdrew a leather wallet. He opened it, and she saw the flood of emotion wash over his face as he flipped through its contents. Finally, he held the wallet out to her. “This is Leighanne – my wife,” he said quietly, and Gretchen’s eyes widened at the beauty of the young, blonde woman in the portrait. She could tell from the hairstyle and type of clothing that it was a dated picture, but even so, Leighanne had been striking.
“She’s beautiful,” Gretchen whispered.
Brian nodded, his adam’s apple bobbing in his throat as he swallowed. He reached out and flipped the picture. Behind it were two more photos, side by side. Gretchen’s breath caught in her throat. Twin girls grinned up at her, each with wispy, blonde hair, big blue eyes, a light smattering of freckles across their identical noses, and missing front teeth. They were cute girls, just a couple years younger than her students. The realization that they were both dead – as well as probably most, if not all, of her students – made Gretchen feel sick to her stomach.
“What are their names?” she asked. She couldn’t bring herself to speak in the past tense.
“Brooke Lynn and Bonnie Leigh.” He pointed them out to her as he spoke the name of each. “We used our first initials – B for Brian, L for Leighanne – for their names. We all went together. We matched. I thought I had the perfect little family, all I could ever want…” He trailed off, and the tears spilled over the puffy red rims of his eyes. A sob escaped his throat, and Gretchen could barely made out the words as he choked, “… and now it’s all gone.”
Gretchen didn’t know what else to say, didn’t think there were words that could express what she felt, so she got up from the floor and went to him, pulling him into a hug. She felt his body – smaller and bonier than she’d imagined it would feel – tense at first, then go limp in her arms, as he relaxed into the hug, his arms encircling her back. Gretchen wasn’t much of a hugger, normally, and had never before initiated a hug with a stranger, but it felt comforting to be able to hold him and be held, herself. His tears wet her bare shoulder, and when at last they pulled away and he saw the moisture there, he snorted and shook his head. “Sorry,” he apologized, managing a sheepish smile as he wiped his eyes.
Her smile back was sympathetic. “Don’t apologize. I’m… I’m glad you told me. I’m not one to talk about the hard stuff either, but sometimes it helps to get it out.”
He took another shuddering breath. “I thought I’d burn in Hell for doing what I did…”
Gretchen shook her head adamantly. “But you had t0-”
“It doesn’t matter,” Brian interrupted her. “Now I know there is no Hell, not in the sense of some other realm of fire and brimstone. This is Hell. Hell is here. We’re already living in it.” Gretchen opened her mouth to protest, but he went on gravely, “If the dead are walking on Earth, there must be no Hell, and if my wife and daughters were among them, there must be no Heaven either. I didn’t free them. I just ended their existence.”
Gretchen listened in dismay to this bleak view of their situation and couldn’t accept it. “But what about their souls? You can’t tell me those creatures out there have souls. Your wife and children… their souls had already gone on, the natural way. What you saw after that was only their bodies, not them. Their souls, the real them…”
“Are where? Certainly not in Heaven. Certainly not with God and Jesus. The Lord I believed in put His children through hardships, to make them stronger, but He would never allow such an abomination to happen on the Earth He created,” spewed Brian. The look on his face was that of a man betrayed. “I don’t believe in that God anymore,” he went on bitterly. “There is no God. There is no afterlife. The only life after death is the kind moaning at us from outside.”
Goosebumps rose on Gretchen’s flesh. Despite the stifling heat, she felt cold from the inside out. She had never been devoutly religious, though she believed in a God, but to hear this gentle, Southern man renounce his faith with such venom hurt her heart in a way she didn’t fully understand. It was not just depressing; it was downright unsettling. And there was nothing she could say to change his mind. His points were valid. They left her questioning, wondering, herself…
“I lost a baby,” she said suddenly, so candidly it surprised even herself. She once had agonized over having to tell people about her tragedy, but now the words flowed from her with relative ease. “About a month ago. I had a miscarriage. It was my first pregnancy.”
The anger left Brian’s eyes. “I’m sorry,” he said, reaching out to touch her shoulder.
She acknowledged the gesture with a nod. “I was devastated. I felt sad, disappointed. I felt guilty. I wondered about the baby. I still do. Was it a boy or a girl? What would it have been like? I wondered about the baby’s soul – what happens to babies who die before they’re even born? I hadn’t felt it move it, but I was through my first trimester, and I’d heard its heartbeat. It was alive inside me…”
She would never forget hearing the miraculous, rapid whoosh-whoosh of her baby’s heartbeat on the Doppler monitor in her doctor’s office. She could hear it even now, in her head, but with it, forever tarnishing it, was the memory of the obstetrician’s face a few weeks later, as she looked at the ultrasound, grainy and completely still. Gretchen had known even before she’d been told, simply by the stillness… and the silence.
Blinking back the tears that threatened, Gretchen looked at Brian and said, “I know it’s not the same… but I can empathize with losing a child.”
He nodded grimly, squeezing her shoulder again. “It doesn’t matter the circumstances,” he replied. “It’s never easier or any less painful one way or the other. But life goes on… if you can call this living. I guess we’ve got to, too.”
She sighed and listened to the muffled scrapes and thumps of the monsters outside, still relentlessly trying to claw their way in. “So what are we going to do?”
***
They left the back room together, cautiously pulling the shelves out of the way and creeping out into the open store. A row of zombies blocked the wall of windows, their bloated gray faces pressed against the glass. Over their shoulders, still more were on the horizon, their slouched and stiffened forms silhouetted against the sunrise.
“There’s just too many of them,” murmured Gretchen despairingly. “We’d never make it out alive. And even if we did, where would we run?”
They both looked out into the parking lot. The Cadillac which had been pulled up to one of the pumps was blackened, its windows blown out in the explosions. The pick-up truck parked closest to the building looked to be in better shape, but they knew that it was locked, with no keys inside.
They’d both wondered about the zombie they’d killed in the back room, surely the owner or at least an employee of the gas station. Surely he had a car around here – if not the pick-up truck, then possibly around back. If the keys weren’t in the vehicle, perhaps they were on him. But the dead zombie was outside, blocked from view by the live ones who were crowded in front of the locked door. They would never get to him in enough time to rummage for keys. And what if there were none? Or if there were, what if they didn’t go to the truck after all? It seemed too big a chance to take.
There was another option, a tan Suburban parked further down the road, in the opposite direction from where their own SUV had stalled. They could just barely see it out the windows. It looked to be in drivable condition, no flat tires that they could make out, likely just another vehicle left by a dying person who had tried – and failed – to outrun the plague. But they had no way of knowing if it had gas, keys, or even if it was unlocked. If it didn’t… if it wasn’t… there would be no escape for them. The distance was too great; the zombie hordes would close in on them before they could make it back to the safety of the gas station.
In the station, they had supplies and relative security. The situation was serious, but not desperate.
As a look of grim uncertainty passed between them, Brian and Gretchen came to a silent consensus.
They would wait.
