Fear of the Dead (25 page)

Atton:
I don’t have any questions.

Dr. Shore:
Perfect. Then if you don’t mind, I would prefer it if we kept this session short.

Atton:
You have plans for Christmas?

Dr. Shore:
I’m visiting relatives in Washington.

Atton:
That sounds nice.

Dr. Shore:
Chin up Atton. There’s no reason to feel low. You have a bright future ahead of you. Keep with the program, and eventually you will reach recovery.

Closing

Chapter Fourteen

Day Seven

Saturday

April 26, 2003

12:25 AM

Vanessa ran, and no matter how far she went it never occurred to her to stop. All signs of infected eventually faded away, but her legs didn’t allow her to slow. Not even for a second. She kept on going, panting, keeping her eyes straight forward, doing all that she could to avoid turning back.

The flashlight swayed at the bottom of her fist, bringing light to her every step. There was no telling what corners they were hiding behind, or where they could come from. Even if she couldn’t see them, the infected were everywhere. She darted past rows of streets and buildings, paying no attention to her surrounding neighborhood. Vanessa increased her pace, staring straight as she pelted her limbs forward. She didn’t want to bring her eyes on anything that would have caused her to look back. Her mind, her body, were riddled with panic. Even when her breaths turned into wheezes, her instinct didn’t allow her to stop. Like a machine, her legs kept on leaping, and her arms kept on swinging.

It was a cold, frigid night. And yet nowhere near enough to hold back the sweat that was pouring down Vanessa’s skin. The palms of her hands were soaked with moisture, infecting everything she touched with sweat. On her left hand was her flashlight. And on her right the notebook she’d barely managed to escape with.

The sound of Grace’s screams ratcheted all around her, constantly calling her name.

Vanessa. Vanessa. Vanessa.

No matter how far Vanessa ran, she couldn’t escape the call. The feeling that Grace was still right behind her, calling her for help.

1:27 AM

Grace is dead. She’s been dead for an hour now. Just because I didn’t see her die doesn’t mean that it didn’t happen. That monster grabbed her. I heard her cry. He killed her the moment he laid his hands on her.

It wasn’t my fault. There was nothing I could have done to stop it. It was too dark. It was too hard to see. If I’d only known he was there before.

Grace, I am so sorry.

3:32 AM

Vanessa didn’t allow herself the luxury of sleep. She locked herself inside the public restroom of the O’Mallery Baseball Park, sitting with her back propped against the cold, metal door. She batted her eyelids to keep herself awake, but increasingly the effort grew more and more hopeless.

So much of her life was hopeless. So much out of her own control. What was the point of going on? Why fight when in the end there was nothing left to fight for?

Vanessa reopened her journal. She thought of writing something down when she turned the page and caught traces of handwriting that weren’t hers. The first sentence at the top read
My name is Grace Minien
. And with that Vanessa remembered that moment only yesterday when she asked Grace to write in her journal.

With her flashlight in hand, Vanessa proceeded to read the entire entry, subconsciously imagining Grace’s ghostly voice guiding her along the cursive passages. The entry spoke of her childhood, and what life was like when she and her family had been moved to Tula Lake at the Japanese internment camps. Grace wrote in detail about her mother’s attempts to keep the family together, only to have it all fall apart in the end. And then, finally, when her eyes came to the end of her tale, Grace’s final words left only a haunting impression in Vanessa’s mind.

Life is as fleeting as the people we meet.

7:32 AM

By the time she reopened her eyes, the desire for sleep had all but cleared away. Vanessa yawned and stretched her arms. It was hard to see a thing beyond the tiny, frosted windows directly below the ceiling. It was too high up, and was obscured both on the inside and out. All Vanessa could make out was that it was morning again, and it was windy outside.

The distorted image of a tree swayed its arms to Vanessa’s right, the tip of its bark bending just a bit. It was cold outside. Vanessa could tell because it was cold inside as well. The temperature didn’t bother her much however. The track uniform was warm, though she had to hide her fingers inside her pockets to keep them from feeling like ice.

She unlocked the door and stepped outside. Leaves blew across her feet, guided by a gust of wind that was every bit as powerful as it was loud. Long whistles of air carried beyond every brush of resistance, shaking all that stood in its path.

Vanessa’s long hair landed over her face, blinding her until she tucked it behind her ear. She watched as the entire baseball park fluttered in one cohesive direction, moving wherever the wind told them to go.

A touch of water dropped on her forehead. Vanessa looked up, and saw a grey cloud hovering directly above. More water began to drop, touching the sleeves of her tracksuit until she started to shiver.

She left the baseball park and wandered along the street, not knowing where she was or where to go. The rain continued until it quickly evolved into a downright storm. The instinct to seek shelter eventually arose from within when her clothes started feeling cold. Vanessa ignored the call, and continued on along her aimless way.

A few feet away on the sidewalk came the body of a grey-haired cop lying with his face against the pavement. Vanessa flinched at the mere sight of him, and widened her eyes when she saw him rise to his feet. Like her, his police uniform was drenched in rain. The man’s eyes were red, and his skin a sickly shade of white.

The infected started pacing in her direction, gaping viciously at her as he did.

The drive for self-preservation suddenly came back the same as it always had. The echoing voice of intuition told her to pick up her feet, to turn around and run. It told her to keep at any which direction necessary to keep her as far away from the infected as possible.

But for the first time, Vanessa didn’t listen.

Intuition always told her everything she needed to know in order to survive. But it never once told her why. It never explained to her the point of survival, or to what end she had to live. Like the infected, humans were creatures of instinct. Nothing more. There was no future to look forward to. No light at the end of the tunnel. Like Grace said at the end of her journal.

Life is as fleeting as the people we meet.

The infected drew closer, staggering until it picked up pace. All the while Vanessa had given up running. What was the point after all, when everybody else was already dead? Why be the last one left behind?

In one solitary second, the infected steeled itself away from her, turning for a second to catch sight of something else. It dropped its jaws, and out came the first signs of a high pitched scream, interrupted only by a louder ring in the air. An undeniable blast, and immediately after the infected’s head shattered into shards of bone and organ.

As Vanessa searched to make sense of what had just happened before her eyes, a man stepped out in front of her. A tall dark man with a bald head and an old looking shotgun.

“
Come on,” he said impatiently.

Before Vanessa could react, she felt his large, scaly hand on her arm.

“
Come on,” he repeated.

Vanessa didn’t move, so he dragged her instead towards a white SUV on the road that had its front door wide open, and its motor running. He placed her in the back seat before promptly closing the door. He took the wheels, and the car began sprinting away, leaving in its tail a horde of restless infected that she hadn’t noticed before.

Vanessa watched them chase the car, their distance growing further every second. Eventually they stopped running, and gave up altogether.

7:53 AM

His name was Atton Stone. She remembered him only once he mentioned his first name. He was one of the four survivors who’d saved her life three days ago. Or was it four? And he was one of the two that Grace had mentioned left the group. The other, she remembered, was a man named Eli.

They introduced each other. When she asked him how he’d found her, he said he’d been searching since all of last night. When Vanessa told him about what happened back at Costco, and about what happened to Grace, he said he already knew.

“
I checked there myself. There were zombies everywhere.”

“
Did you see Grace?”

He hesitated. Then, “Yes.”

Vanessa didn’t have to think hard to know what he meant.

“
I didn’t find you there, so I thought you’d have taken off by foot.”

“
So you spent the whole night looking.”

He confirmed with a nod.

“
It was a good thing I found you.”

Vanessa leaned back on her chair, staring out the window beside her whilst quietly wondering if she agreed.

“
Thank you,” she replied nonetheless.

Atton nodded. And as he drove the car along unfamiliar roads, Vanessa continued to gaze out into the open scenery. He took her up a freeway she’d never seen before, someplace far away from the city. She didn’t ask where he was taking her. For the life of her she didn’t care. At the most she imagined either that Atton didn’t quite know himself, or that he did know, and that the place was yet another safe house for them to seek refuge in until the infected found a way inside. Whatever the case may have been, Vanessa didn’t hold out much hope.

Out of sheer curiosity, she leaned forward on the driver’s seat to catch the time on the car. 8:24 AM, it said. It wasn’t until she leaned back that Vanessa picked up on the fact that Atton’s car was missing a key in the ignition. The cover on the steering column was gone, and hanging at the bottom of it were a few exposed wires, one tied to the other in a way that she couldn’t tell where one copper link began and the other one ended.

The view outside was a world of disfigured shapes and refractions. Massive pellets of rain obscured what could be seen from the window of her car, leaving little to see in the distant horizon.

“
Do you think things will ever get better?” she asked.

Atton glimpsed at her through the rearview mirror.

“
I hope so.”

8:43 AM

I know it’s kind of a cliché to think of anything especially bad that happens as a bad dream. I can’t count the number of times I’ve heard people talk about their own personal horror stories and say it was just like a dream, or a nightmare. I hear enough of that on TV, and twice more times from my friends. Or at least I used to.

Still, as corny as it sounds, that was what it felt like to me when people started evacuating California. When Tom and I drove to his father’s bunker up in Fremont, I always had this idea in my head that things weren’t going to last forever. That in a matter of time, the government or the National Guard would have it all cleaned up and solved like it was never there, and Tom and I would eventually step out of that entire disaster like it was just a bad dream. No consequences. No long lasting pain. Things would go back to the way they were before.

Is it too late for optimism? Are we deluding ourselves when we think that things can always get better?

When Grace said that

8:47 AM

Vanessa dropped her pen when out in the corner of her eye she saw what appeared to be headlights shimmering in the rain. She leaned against the window, and a car drove into view on the leftmost lane of the empty freeway. A red Jaguar convertible. There were people in it. One man, one woman beside him, and a little girl in the back seat. They were all alive.

“
Holy shit,” Vanessa gasped. “Are you seeing this?”

The Jag continued forward until it matched the speed of the SUV. Vanessa stared at the people inside just as closely as they stared back at her. The man driving had on sunglasses and a white polo shirt. He was middle-aged, driving with one hand on the steering wheel, another outstretched on the headrest to his right, brushing against the woman sitting next to him. The woman was young, with curled brown hair and a beanie. Their daughter, the girl in the back seat, wore a pink, puffy jacket zipped all the way to her neck, and she had on a pair of large winter gloves. Vanessa estimated her to be around eight or nine years old. She had perfectly round eyes, and hair that was either brown or black. Vanessa couldn’t say for sure, and she couldn’t for the life of her take her eyes off the girl.