LEFT ALIVE (Zombie series Box Set): Books 1-6 of the Post-apocalyptic zombie action and adventure series (25 page)

She’s dressed in a new pair of jeans that don’t have holes in them and is wearing a red tank top under a black button-up shirt that she’s knotted to fit tightly to her immaculate figure. I look at her for a moment, wondering if she’s going to say anything. When she doesn’t, I watch her gather her things into the pack.

“South?” she asks finally, when the silence is too much.

“South,” I answer.

She helps fit the knife into the harness that she built for me and I look at it one more time before she hands me a pair of sunglasses. “People go blind out there because of the sun,” she warns me before I put on the aviators she gives me. She smiles and I’m glad that I’m wearing them. My eyes have taken up the instinct of staring straight at her cleavage. “I forgot to tell you yesterday,” she says, as she takes the rope off the door and coils it up before slinging it over my shoulder. “I like the haircut. Nice to see that there’s someone handsome underneath all that hair.”

I don’t answer, mostly because she doesn’t give me a chance. She’s out into the predawn light of the coming day and I follow her, taking one last glance back at the tattoo parlor. I’m almost sad to see it go. If this town wasn’t so completely vacant of any kind of resources, I might have stayed here and set up a place to live with the girls. It’s quiet. It’s peaceful. I could think of very few places other than here that I would want to live. Honestly, the only other place would be Jason’s house. That is, if the Zombies didn’t overrun the place.

We head south out of town and before we make it to the far side, I stop and see exactly where it was I lost my hand. There is a violent, grotesque marker where Captain Bear Trap’s body had been. The Zombies have made a buffet of his corpse and there’s hardly anything left. His decaying bones are scattered all across the alleyway and the street beyond. There is nothing left of him that can be discerned as a human being. He’s just a scattering of bones. He had been a monster in his life and now in his death he isn’t even human. I look at him with complete and utter apathy as if the world was a better place now, completely washed clean of the filth this man had been.

How many others had he trapped there with his nasty, monstrous invention? I look at the trash bag with its empty cans everywhere and feel a hatred rising inside of me. I wish I hadn’t killed him. I wish I could have stuck his face in that bear trap. I wish that I could clamp it down on his balls. I want him to know the agony that I now have to live with. There are people everywhere—or at least there were—who don’t have both of their hands, but this is different for me. I did have both of my hands and I was completely deprived of one. The bastard took my hand and I want it back. God, I want my hand back, not some knife abomination built out of a sex toy.

I can feel Lindsay next to me and I don’t want her here. It’s like the grave of an old friend that she never knew. It feels unholy and blasphemous for her to be here, looking at the site where I lost my hand. She hadn’t been here while I was screaming for help and in agony. She hadn’t been there when he came out and beat me with his baseball bat. She hadn’t seen me reduce his head to pulp with his own trap. I am thankful she saved me, but God, why couldn’t she have been there sooner? Why couldn’t she make it in time for me to still have both of my hands? I slump my head forward and I look at the knife that has replaced my hand. Suddenly I realize something. That hand had been the hand Tiffany slipped my wedding ring on to. Of course, I hadn’t worn my wedding ring in years. It felt wrong to wear it after she died.

“You okay?” Lindsay asks me.

“Yeah,” I mutter. “Let’s go.”

“Why are your girls in Florida?” Lindsay asks after a half hour of silence and walking.

She’s not used to moving during the day and the sun is unforgiving of her lack of preparation. I’m a little rusty from all the injuries, but I’m making good progress. I have to stop and take breaks, which drives me insane. I get about ten minutes of solid travel before something begins to hurt and I have to take a moment to let the pain relax and subside into me. I’m standing, looking up into the sunlight while she’s talking to me, walking to keep up with me. Clearly, she isn’t used to distance travel.

“They were still going to class,” I answer. “They went to the University of Florida.”

“Gators,” Lindsay says after a moment.

“Go Gators,” I nod as I continue walking.

“Are they pretty?” she calls after me.

I stop and turn on her. “What kind of a question is that?”

“Lot of pretty girls in Florida,” Lindsay shrugs. “Do they fit the crowd?”

“I think so,” I answer, turning and picking up the pace.

“You know, when I was in Columbus,” Lindsay hurries to keep up, “Ohio State was probably the safest place before the refugees declared war on them. It was one hell of a fight when I left with Kelci. The whole place was full of gunshots and explosions in the distance. You could see the light of the burning city for miles after you left.”

I have no doubt that Lindsay lost a lot of friends to seriously violent and lethal ends in Columbus, but I lost people too. At least she knows that her friends are dead. She knows that they went down in a fight, doing what they loved, with the ones they loved. I have coworkers, friends from college, my agent, my publisher, my neighbors, and my family scattered to the wind with no way of ever getting ahold of them again. Unless I magically run into them while I’m wandering the wasteland of America now, I’m completely out of luck.

“I don’t think they stuck around on campus,” I answer. It was a lie. I know that they weren’t there. The last thing that Val said to me was that they were going to a beach house that one of their friends knew. If they were smart, they kept their heads down. The girls were beautiful in a girl next door sort of way. They were never vain or overly dedicated to being the most beautiful girls at school. I’m sure if they tried a little harder, they would be. They just had different interests. But there was never a difficulty for them finding friends. Val always latched on to the intellectuals that were driven to do the very best they could at everything. Lexi, on the other hand, was more of an adrenaline junkie, just like Lindsay in a way. She found those who were willing to go have adventures and do strange and terrifying things for the glory and pleasure of it. She had always been much braver than me.

“So how are you going to find them?” Lindsay prods.

“Need to find a radio,” I tell her. “We need to get some sort of idea of what’s going on ahead of us.”

“You think people are still broadcasting the top one hundred?” Lindsay chuckles.

I stop and turn to her. “No.” She looks at me, tilting her sunglasses down her nose as if she was trying to decipher if she’d done anything wrong. It was her naivety that bothered me. For such a trained killer and tracker and survivor, she didn’t know a thing about what was going on in the world. “There’s a whole network of people broadcasting out of cities across the country. They’ve got a few screws loose, but they give good information for the most part.”

“Like what?” Lindsay genuinely sounds curious.

“A guy out of Port Huron was reporting Zombies long before I ever saw one,” I say, continuing to walk across the scorched, ashen world. “I was too ignorant to believe him until I saw them for myself.” I pause and decide to give her everything else I know. “There was a sizeable force heading for Detroit just behind me, and when they hit the outskirts, the whole place went to hell. They burned the whole damn city. That’s when I lost my radio. They could be right behind us for all I know. Or they might have went west for Chicago. Who knows know?” I can tell Lindsay is looking over her shoulder behind her.

“Were they cannibals?” she asks.

“No clue,” I answer.

After about an hour of silence, I can hear her grunting and grumbling to herself. I look over my shoulder and see that she’s probably twenty yards behind me. I stop and take a drink of water, waiting for her to catch up. It’s hot. It’s always been hot though. Unless there is a storm, the sun usually shines bright as ever, though it looks diffused. She’s just not used to it. She’ll get better as time goes on, I have no doubt. But part of me thinks that this might not be the best way to go about the whole southern journey. I would have been in Florida by now if I had been smarter about which roads I took and when I decided to stop and what for. I need a car. I need something that will get me across more land. I would gladly take one car with a half a tank of gas over walking now. Walking used to be my last resort and now it has become my only option.

“We need a car,” I say as she stops next to me and takes a bottle of water.

“No shit,” she says. “Why the fuck are we walking during the day?”

“Because of that.” I point to the footprints behind us and the dust that shoots up with every step she takes. “You can see dust trails from a long ways off. Most people out during the day drive vehicles and I want to see them coming.”

“Well, where are we going to find a car?” she asks. “It’s nothing but burnt farmhouses out here.”

“We’ll start heading west,” I answer. “We need to get to Interstate 75. There will be plenty of cars there for us to pick through—if they’re not all wrecked or drained.”

“You know an awful lot about this shit,” Lindsay says as we start walking west across what feels like miles and miles of dead farms. There were hardly any farmhouses left standing and those that were standing had signs that they’d already been thoroughly looted. Lindsay wanted to explore each of them, but I refused to take part. We didn’t need anything at the moment and there were probably no useful materials left for us to scavenge. Time was precious and I had already lost so much of it. I’m not wasting it now.

“We need something lightweight,” I call to her. She’s still behind me.

“No, we need something weighty,” Lindsay shouts. “There’s a lot of shit on the roads. We’ll need to barrel through it.”

“We’re not sticking to the roads,” I turn around and call to her as I keep walking. Keeping on the move was key with Lindsay. My breaks were coming less and less and my body was starting to get back into the normal routine of the endless miles ahead. “If we stick to roads, someone will spot us. We need a small truck or a SUV to keep us maneuvering across these fields.”

“What? We’re sticking to fields?” Lindsay moans. “Charlie, we need food. There ain’t shit in these rural areas. We need to stick to the towns and suburbs where we can find food to eat.”

“Everything has already been hoarded by now,” I reply.

“You’re not thinking hard enough,” Lindsay accuses me. “What about libraries? They always have food drives going on. What about semi-trucks? What about offices with vending machines? You know how many people have completely avoided those places? Why would they even go in there?”

“No,” I shake my head. “Every time I go near a town, something bad happens and it derails me for too long. I need to make my way south, as quickly as possible.”

“Fine,” Lindsay says with a grunt.

We don’t talk for much of the day. After an hour, we pass burnt farmhouse after burnt farmhouse. It’s looking more and more like someone around Cincinnati is propane-happy. I recall the burning farmhouse where I first caught sight of Cal and Denny tracking after me. There is someone out there and they are lighting farmhouses on fire. I don’t understand why anyone would do that, but the sanity of those still alive is very much in question these days. I look at Lindsay as we stand in front of the smoldering ruins of yet another house. If they lit the house on fire two days ago, that would make the most sense of what I’m seeing right now. Why would anyone do this?

“We’re never going to find supplies if we keep running into burnt houses,” Lindsay says grumpily. She’s not happy with the way things are going and I can’t say I blame her. Everything about today is opposite to what she is usually doing. Her life is drastically changing from what she had originally settled into. I understand how difficult that must be. She’s used to finding a place and sucking it dry before moving on, and even then, it’s not too far from where she was originally that she moves. When I was stuck in the parlor, it nearly drove me insane. I am constantly on the move, unlike her. So I know exactly how she feels at the moment.

“We just have to get away from Cincinnati,” I tell her, moving onward. “We’ll find better spots elsewhere.”

“Elsewhere?” Her voice is mocking, as if I’m a naïve little boy dreaming of a better world just over the distant horizon. It bothers me.

“Yes, elsewhere,” I repeat.

“Wake up, Charlie,” Lindsay says with a disappointed voice. “The world is fucked. You and I are probably the last sane people left in the world. We’re sitting on top of a ticking time bomb—no! A fucking egg timer. We’re just running out the clock and when it goes
DING
we’re all dead. It’s a losing game we’re playing, Charlie.”

“No, it’s not,” I answer with as much certainty as I could hope for.

“Oh yeah? So where’s the good guys, Charlie?” Lindsay laughs and I don’t dare look back at whatever smug gesture she’s making. “Where are all the people building houses rather than burning them down? Where are the people fucking and having babies instead of killing and eating people? Where are all those people at?”

“Dying off, just like us,” I answer.

“Losing battle,” she mocks.

I stop, snapping without a moment’s hesitation. My vision blurs and I know that I’m shouting at her, but the words just come pouring out. “What do you know, Lindsay? Huh? Did you see a lot of good people while you were tracking and killing your friends? You don’t know a god damn thing about the good people in the world because those good people left are getting real fucking smart, Lindsay. They’re on to people like you and me. They hunker down and they hide. They’re waiting for the clock to definitely run out and then when people like you and me are dead, they’re going to come up from their little holes and save the world. So stop bitching about other people saving the world and start acting on for the better or you’re just another one of the psychos they’re waiting to watch die.”

She stares at me for a moment, her face an expressionless mask. It drives me insane the way she’s just standing there. I know that this is it. This is the moment where she flips me the bird and just walks away. My little companion is done with this. I’ve pushed her too far and she’s finally broken under me. Good job, Charlie. I’m definitely making friends.

I don’t know why I’m still talking to her. “A week before you found me, I stumbled across a farmhouse, not too different from this one,” I say, haunted by the past. “I didn’t make myself or my intentions known and a guy attacked me, or so I thought. Turns out he was just defending himself and his fiancée.”

“Who was he?” she asks.

“Some guy named Jason,” I shrug. “I killed him before we could really start talking.” There’s a change in her posture. It’s subtle, but I pick up on it. “His fiancée pulled a gun on me. She’s probably the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen. Anyway, instead of killing me, she kills herself, claiming there’s nothing left for her in this world.”

“Were these some of your supposed good guys?” She’s trying to sound like a bitch to keep me riled up.

“Unquestionably,” I say, turning and walking away. If she doesn’t want to hear the rest of the story, then fine. I keep walking and don’t hear her following. In that moment, I decide that this is our parting. This is the goodbye to our short little fellowship.

Then I hear her walking. “How do you know they were good guys?” she asks. “God, why the fuck are we saying good guys? This isn’t an eighties movie.”

I ignore her comments. She’s addicted to inane babbling. “He was growing plants,” I answer.

She stops. “What the fuck did you just say?”

I turn and look at her, stopping as well. “He was growing plants. He had plans to grow hundreds, maybe thousands of them. He had equations too, ways to build compost and make new dirt. I’d never seen anything like it. There were hydroponic schemes and greenhouse designs. He was just some kid from Arizona, so if he was figuring it out, then I have no doubt that someone else out there is figuring it out as well.”

“Then why the hell did you kill him?” Lindsay shouts.

“I didn’t know this beforehand,” I shout back. “It wasn’t like he was advertising it and giving me much of a chance to just walk away.”

“God damn it, Charlie.” Lindsay runs her hands through her hair, pacing as if she’s going over something in her head, a thousand scenarios. I remember the feeling. I remember feeling the same exact way standing in that upstairs room and finally realizing who it was I had just killed. It was an overwhelming and earthshattering emotion to find that hope was not just a vague concept on the horizon but it had become something vastly more tangible and instead of hope, there was possibility. We had moved out of abstract concepts and into reality with Jason’s farmhouse. I knew in my heart that there were others out there. There were others who had the exact same idea and were undoubtedly better equipped. They would be building the world Jason envisioned and I wanted to be part of it. “Do you remember where the house is?”