Rachel, who’s standing watch, glances back. “Really? I’ll get you a new cup.”
I tape the curved metal to the stick and use a thicker stick to open the seal on the garage door’s upper edge. Easing the metal through the space, I say, “I’m just saying, they don’t make things like they used to. My dad had the same tin cup his entire life. He camped with it, cooked in it—”
“Shh,” Rachel says. Her shoulders have loosened, though, which is why I said it in the first place. The way she stood, tense and ready to scream at the first sign of trouble, made me think she’d lose her shit at the next squirrel that frolics by. I’ll get her to Philly, but I have no intention of dying.
I manage to get the stick to the lever. Now is the moment of truth. I used a lot of duct tape, but if I shit around too much, the end is bound to come off. Goodbye, cup handle. I fit it carefully over the latch and give it one good tug. The latch drops and the door comes up with a yank. Luckily, the house is new or well-maintained enough that it doesn’t squeak.
We enter the garage and lower the door, watching out the window to see if we’ve attracted attention. We haven’t. Rachel nudges my side playfully, happy for the first time in hours. “Do I want to know how you knew how to break into a garage?”
“Paul,” I say.
I last spoke to Paul, my oldest friend, the day I spoke to Cassie. He lives in Brooklyn still, with his wife and son. He’s a firefighter and he didn’t know anything more than I did; they were as tight-lipped with the FDNY as they were with everyone else. I managed to extract a promise that he’d come to the cabin if need be, but he was on duty and almost certainly didn’t get out before the bridges blew.
“Of course.” Rachel rolls her eyes and crosses to the bikes. “This one looks—”
One of
them
, a zombie, stumbles into her from behind an upright freezer. He died in his boxers, and the dark hair that covers his chest and stomach is matted with blood. Rachel goes down with a screech. My hand goes for my knife without thought—I stopped keeping count somewhere after thirty—and I cross the space before he can fall after her.
My knife has become my best friend. The Swedish-made, black handled knife doesn’t look like much, but, as they say, you should never judge a book by its cover. It set me back a few hundred dollars years ago, and it was worth every penny then. More so now that it’s kept its edge through skulls and eye sockets. We have guns, but we quickly learned guns are the last resort. If you make noise, you get zombies, and the whole object of the game is to avoid them.
I let the man take my jacket when I near. In order to get a good strike, you have to get close. Close enough to smell their stinking mouths and see the thin, dark blood vessels on gray skin. Close enough to count their brown-stained teeth and wonder how the world has gone downhill so fast.
I bring the blade into the side of his head. Rachel is up, knife out and red-faced, before he reaches the ground. Her knife doesn’t lower. I ask, “You okay?”
“Behind you!”
The connecting door to the house is open. It was hidden by the freezer, and I’m an idiot for not checking immediately upon entering. The rest of the family feeds out—a woman and two girls, maybe ages five and three. I’ll let the girls nip at my legs and waist; I wear a waxed canvas jacket and jeans lined with long johns, and I have a bigger problem coming my way. Mom hits me belly-first, sumo wrestler-style. I draw her head back by the hair to expose the underside of her chin. A long enough knife, right up the side of the trachea, works like a charm.
Rachel has backed onto the hood of the sedan. There’s no way she’ll get into Philly alone. She hates to kill them. Hates to touch them. She’s done it when push has come to shove, but I know why she hasn’t this time: kids are different. Even bloody and growling, they retain an air of innocence—feral kittens that could be tamed if you tried hard enough. I try to think of them as little zombies. They’re just as ferocious as their parents. They’re already dead. They’ll kill me just as dead.
The girls head for Rachel, the small one’s pink nightgown swinging around her frail calves. I ram my knife through the base of the older sister’s skull. I tell myself I’m doing her a service, a mercy. It doesn’t feel like it. I take the little one by her long dark hair, and her socked feet scrabble on the smooth concrete. I slide my knife into the same spot as I did her sister, lower her to the floor, and then move to shut the door.
When I turn, Rachel is in tears. It’s the tenth cry of the day for her, and it’s the final straw for me. The tears that usually soften my heart only annoy me more. I bend to wipe my knife on the mother’s shirt and tell myself not to say it.
Don’t say the words
.
I look to where she trembles. “Thanks for the help.”
Fuck
.
“I’m sorry I can’t kill them the way you do,” she sputters. “You don’t even care. Look at this fucking world, Eric! You don’t even care!”
It’s a new manifestation of the same old conversation. Now, it’s that I don’t care. Before, I was too brutal. Before that, she hated to see my face when I killed them.
Anger zips through me like electricity. I miss electricity. I walk closer, sliding my knife into its sheath so I’m not tempted to use it on her. “What do you want me to do? Bury them and say a prayer so I can be eaten while I do it? Get a fucking grip, Rachel. I don’t have time to care because I have to kill them while you sit and cry on a goddamn car!”
She wraps her arms around her legs. “Yeah, maybe because I’m still fucking human.”
The words hurt. The snarl on her face hurts. My arms hurt from shoving my knife through bone. My legs hurt from the endless walking, the spurts of running, and from being tense every second of the day. When you hike, when you climb, you have downtime and stories around camp, jokes to exchange. There’s no downtime now. Not ever. Not until I’ve gotten home, and maybe not even then.
I’m trying to keep this together, keep
her
together. I’ve offered to escort my ex-girlfriend to her new boyfriend—to live in the same house as him, for fuck’s sake—and
I’m
not human.
I step over the girls’ bodies and grab the man’s bike. It looks fine, and although I should check it more thoroughly, if I have to spend one more minute in this garage I’ll kill Rachel. I carry it to the door and keep my eyes on the window. “Ready?”
A few moments later, she wheels her bike over.
Chapter 18
Rachel’s brother, Grant, lives by the art museum on the west side of the city, on a street of well-maintained attached brick houses, also known as rowhomes. The bikes cut our half-day hike to an hour or so—without zombies. With zombies, it’s a circuitous route of back streets that dead-end and circle until we find a map in a glove compartment and a quiet street on which to plan a route.
I study the roads. We’re getting there, but the streets are deadly and turning deadlier as we close in on Philly. So many people lived, and died, and now live again that avoiding them is impossible. It doesn’t bode well for Rachel, or for Brooklyn. I put it out of my mind and point to the railroad tracks that lead to where multiple bridges cross the river into the city. Philly isn’t an island, so I think there’s a good chance the bridges still stand.
“See the train tracks here?” I point to the map. Rachel doesn’t turn. “It’ll be a bumpy ride, but I’m game for a little cross-country cycling if you are.”
Rachel stands astride her bike and nods into the distance. Her hair is a mess, her pants are ripped, but she hasn’t cried since we left the garage. She hasn’t spoken to or looked at me, either. Not crying is enough. Her words have repeated in my mind until I’ve reached the point where I can’t wait to be rid of her.
“This isn’t funny, Eric,” Rachel says, lips barely moving. “Stop trying to make light of it.”
Rachel has a sense of humor, but it’s more of the conventional kind. It makes me miss my sister even more. Cassie was beaten down by the deaths of our parents in a car accident three years ago and checked out of life for a while, but she hasn’t lost her sense of humor. She might choose beer and a board game over rappelling down a cliff any day of the week, but I’m positive she isn’t freaking out. It’s impossible not to freak out a little, at least at first, but once you wrap your head around the craziness, you have to stay sane somehow. Dark humor is in our genes. I can die having laughed every chance I got, or I can die having been miserable. Either way, I’ll be dead. Besides, I didn’t mean it as much of a joke.
I start off without a word. Rachel catches up quickly. We ride east as far as possible, sticking to a two-lane country-ish road filled with cars. Our bikes are silent and maneuverable, and the large front yards give us room to pass around clumps of corpses. We make it into a small town full of useless shops in quaint red brick buildings. They were useful when one needed jewelry, boutique clothing or children’s books, but those things are no longer on my list. We brought along dehydrated food and, with the supplemental food we’ve found along the way, we don’t need to venture into the bagel shop.
The children’s books remind me of Leo, Paul’s son. Blond-haired and sweet, though with that devious side little boys have—maybe always have. Whenever I visit, he climbs all over me and talks my ear off. I hope he’s still talking, at a lower volume. He is if Paul has had anything to say about it.
Past the shops, Rachel brakes when the train tracks cross the road ahead on an overpass. “Great idea,
Eric
. So how are we going to get up there?”
I plant my feet on the ground and take a calming breath. This woman wants to die by my hand. “At the train station just around the corner. If you’d actually looked at the map, you’d know.”
She scowls. I ride ahead, seething. The parking lot is full of cars. I can’t recall if train service stopped immediately or if they continued running in order to get people off to less-populated areas, but a train is stopped down the tracks, doors open, surrounded by zombies and, blessedly, in the direction we don’t have to travel. We stay out of sight on the platform until we hit the other end and can lower our bikes and ourselves down.
My mountain bike’s tires are knobby, as are Rachel’s, but pedaling over rocks leaves a bit to be desired. A lot to be desired. The railroad ties are no better. I pump my legs and bend over the handlebars when I hear the group behind us, which was quiet, come to life.
Come to life
—that’s pretty funny. I’m sure Rachel would get a kick out of that one, but I decide to keep it to myself.
The clatter of spraying rocks is followed by a wallop that brings me to a halt. I look over my shoulder. Rachel has wiped out and lies under her bike, watching the sky. I’m not too worried about the zombies coming down the tracks—the few hundred feet will take a minute or two—but when Rachel makes no move to stand, I drop my bike and run the ten feet back to her.
“Rachel, you okay?” I lift her bike and extend a hand. She tears her eyes from the sky, looks at me blankly and then resumes sky-watching. I yank her arm, but she’s gone limp the way Leo does when Paul says it’s bedtime. It’s a joke they share, and Paul is a big guy who can lift Leo no problem. But this isn’t a joke, and I can’t carry her, two packs and ride two bikes. Without the bikes, we won’t make it.
“Rachel! Get up!”
She shakes her head. I look down the tracks. They’re making progress. Sweat forms a pool beneath my pack. If she doesn’t get up, I’ll have to leave her. I’ll have to.
“Get the fuck up!” I shout. “They’re coming!”
Her head idly rotates in that direction and then swings back. No expression.
I kneel. “Do you want to live? If you do, get the fuck up, Rachel.”
They’re seventy feet away. I’ll leave. I’ll give them to twenty feet and then I’ll leave. I squeeze Rachel’s arm so tight she squeaks. I don’t care. I lean close and growl, “You are going to die, Rachel. In one minute you are going to die.”
That does it. She pulls herself to sitting and then gets on her hands and knees before she stands. She takes the handlebars. The zombies are at fifteen feet, but I make sure she’s on her bike and pedaling before I run to mine.
Chapter 19
I don’t want to toot my own horn, but taking the train tracks was a great idea. Once they widen, we ride on the grass alongside the rocks and ties until we have to bump across the overpasses. The fences kept the zombies out while the noises of all hell breaking loose from the residential areas ensured that they stayed where the action was.
Other people had the same idea; I can tell by the remnants they’ve left behind—food wrappers and a whole lot of human excrement. The usual
pack it in, pack it out
rule doesn’t apply. I wonder where they’ve gone and what they’re doing now. If they’re the bodies we see on the streets below in ripped clothes and a crackled coating of brown blood.
It’s almost too much to think about at length. If I try to estimate the number of people who’ve died and, therefore, my chances of survival, it looks pretty grim. A thousand to one odds might give me a chance, but I think they’re more along the lines of a million to one. Forty million to one.
Cassie, cabin, Cassie, cabin
. It’s my mantra. Get my sister and head for our parents’ house. There’s food—a lot of food—and solar and seeds and land.
I know John, our only neighbor in the woods of upstate New York, was already constructing a perimeter around his house. John doesn’t fuck around. I managed to get a call through to him over 24 hours after the bridges blew and before every phone line went kaput. If Cassie left Brooklyn before that, she’d had almost 48 hours to make the four-hour drive, but John said she wasn’t there. I’m currently riding a bike to Philly on train tracks, so I’m well aware of what can go wrong while driving, but the roads hadn’t yet been clogged. The panic began the next day. She should’ve arrived.
Any doubt I have dissipates—I’m going to Brooklyn. Cassie will kill me when I arrive. She’s overprotective of me, her younger brother by just under two years. It doesn’t matter that I was taller and able to beat her up by the time we reached our early teens. So what? So she’ll kill me—there’s no point in living without people, without family.