Resurrection: A Zombie Novel (4 page)

But they had most of what they needed inside. Cans of soup. Cans of spaghetti and ravioli. Cans of clam chowder that dubiously claimed to be restaurant quality. Cans of baby food. No one had a baby, nor had anyone tried to eat any baby food yet, but it had to be fine in a pinch. Nobody was interested in the canned vegetables, but Kyle figured that would change soon enough and they’d all be happy to have them.

The breakfast aisle was popular. The Pop-Tarts and granola bars were okay, but a few aisles down were bags of powdered milk that could be reconstituted with water. And since the store’s picnic section had thin cardboard bowls and plastic spoons, they could eat an actual breakfast that was exactly like some of the actual breakfasts they used to eat before the world went over the cliff. Rice Krispies and Froot Loops were bound to get old eventually, but they sure beat cold soup.

They had beef jerky and dried meat sticks, which were fantastic, though hardly substitutes for cheeseburgers and steaks. The fruit roll-ups and jam tasted all right, but eating those just wasn’t the same as crunching into a tart apple or sucking juice and pulp from an orange.

No one felt guilty or childish when eating peanut butter out of the jar. It tasted good, and it was heavier and felt more nourishing than most of the other foods they could still eat. Peanut butter stuck to their ribs. It was the new steak and potatoes.

The other best thing was the tuna-fish section. They had so many cans of tuna that everyone was already sick of eating the stuff. But also right next to the tuna in the very same section were cans of chopped turkey and chicken. It came in cans that looked identical to the tuna-fish cans. Kyle didn’t know such items even existed until now, and he dug into one before even bothering to open a fish can.

They weren’t short on beverages. They had an entire row of warm Coke and Pepsi and Root Beer and Sprite. Warm soda tasted more syrupy than usual, but that was okay. They also had a substantial selection of flavored iced tea and sports drinks. And, of course, beer and wine. Parker was working his way through various craft beers, but Kyle preferred red wine now that the power was out and the refrigerators were off. He liked a good craft beer as much as any Northwesterner, but the stuff was warm now and it wasn’t the same. At least wine was supposed to be kept at room temperature.

The fresh meat, fresh fruit, fresh vegetables, milk, butter, and frozen food were finished. All that stuff was just chucked out back. It reeked back there something awful, like 10,000 trash cans. The whole mess of rotting food was coalescing into a putrid sludge oozing with bacteria and swarming with insects. Kyle was certain by now that it was a biohazard. The whole store smelled like that when they first got there. Getting rid of the spoiled food was a spectacularly unpleasant task that Kyle would never forget.

He also wouldn’t forget how they’d fortified the place. That, Kyle thought, was something for the history books—assuming history books would ever be written again. Kyle didn’t know how many people were left in the world, but he was certain it was one percent at the most.

They were safe for now—sort of—but they couldn’t stay there forever. The food would run out eventually, and they’d have to leave. They’d have no way of finding or producing more food, not here, not in this place, and probably not any other place that was suburban or urban. They’d need to grow food and hunt food, and that required a rural location.

And they needed long-term security. What better place for that than one of the San Juan Islands? Those things couldn’t get to them there. They could live in houses and plant crops and hunt deer and fish. They could stock up on medicines and install solar panels and turn on the lights and even watch movies. Their lives could be relatively stress-free and idyllic in a mild climate with plenty of rainwater.

But if they stayed too long in that store on the mainland, they’d die.

“If you want to stay here,” Kyle told Parker, “then stay. I can’t stop you. I’m not even going to try. But I’m taking everyone who wants to come with me up to those islands.”

*   *   *

Parker, his guns freshly oiled, sat on the floor near the front door and watched his companions through slitted eyes. Carol was on another one of her cleaning jags. Kyle paced and thought and talked too much as usual. Hughes and Frank hadn’t returned yet.

He wasn’t sure they’d ever return.

The fortified grocery hadn’t been attacked yet, but their luck had to run out eventually. They were on the outskirts of a town, for God’s sake. The place should be crawling with the infected. Parker figured it would take at least another month before most of those things starved, if not longer. It depended on how much food they could find in the meantime and how well they could adapt while suffering their … affliction.

He doubted those things could adapt. The virus spread with unspeakable speed and ferocity, but Parker didn’t think it had a long life span. It did far too much damage to the host’s mind. The basic and primitive lizard part of the brain seemed to be all that was left, and even that was distorted beyond recognition.

Kyle’s pacing and Carol’s incessant cleaning annoyed him, but on some level he was actually grateful. They made just enough noise to drown out the quiet. Not enough noise to attract a horde, but enough that Parker could forget that he was a witness to the end of all things.

The end of all things. He still hadn’t wrapped his mind around that. The implications of more than six billion dead were too overwhelming, like contemplating the number of molecules in the ocean or the number of stars in the galaxies.

And it wasn’t just the number of dead. Everything was falling apart. Flip a light switch and nothing happens. Want gas for your car? Get a hose and siphon it out of somebody else’s. Want fresh milk for your cereal? Find a cow that hasn’t yet starved or been eaten. Water exploded out of the faucet when he twisted the tap, but that wouldn’t last. Nor would the boxes of dry goods that hadn’t expired. What would they do when they ran out? Farm? Where? How? None of his companions knew the first thing about farming.

He didn’t even like his companions. Hughes was okay, but Frank was useless if nobody gave him an order. Carol was dead weight. She had no asset aside from her gender. If enough humans could figure out a way to survive and rebuild in this broken new world, some of them would have to be women for obvious reasons, but that was the beginning and end of Carol’s usefulness. She couldn’t fight, couldn’t think straight, couldn’t drive on the roads, couldn’t carry anything heavy, and failed to offer a useful opinion on anything.

Kyle, on the other hand, talked and thought too much about everything. And he was practically still a kid. Parker was pushing forty, but Kyle couldn’t be a day over twenty-five. Parker remembered how stupid he was in his twenties. He thought he had it all figured out, but all he’d really done was survive adolescence.

And that button-up flannel shirt Kyle wore. Good grief. The grunge look went out of style long ago, even in Seattle. Kyle needed practical clothes like what Parker was wearing: water-resistant cargo plants, a black fleece sweatshirt that kept him warm even when wet, and his favorite olive drab army jacket.

And the dumb kid shaved every day, a spectacular waste of effort and time. Kyle kept his face baby’s-ass smooth as if he might get a date. A date with who? Carol?

Worst of all, though, Kyle was a goddamn lunatic for thinking they ought to leave their food and fortifications behind for some mythical island where unicorns romped in the fields and fairies lived in the trees.

An island would be nice, sure, if they could beam there like in
Star Trek
, but their grocery store was a castle. They had food, water, bathrooms, basic medicine, clothes, blankets, and a whole row of gas cans by the back door.

Every single window was boarded up with plywood except for slits at the top to let in some light. Two-by-fours braced the front and the back doors. No one, and no thing, could force its way in unless it was driving a truck or wielding an ax.

Hughes and Frank had hauled the lumber, nails, and hammers in the Chevy from a hardware store down the street. They did it at night. The darkness at night now that the power was out gave him the creeps. Billions of new stars seemed to leap toward the planet from the farthest reaches of space, but Parker couldn’t see a damn thing if the moon wasn’t up.

Only once since he was seven and afraid of his closet did he feel real fear of the dark. He’d gone on a camping trip with a buddy who marched him and his sorry ass seven miles up a trail in the Olympic mountains. That was maybe ten years ago. The scenery was spectacular. Parker had never seen anything like it because there is nothing else like it. The Olympic Peninsula produced the only true temperate rain forest on earth. Not even the other lush forests of Washington and Oregon are like the forests in the Olympics. Everything’s wet all the time. Baby trees grow from the sides of fallen dead trees, sucking nutrients from their predecessors like cannibals. Curtains of moss the size of houses hang from the canopy.

Unlike in the volcanic Cascades, where they’re few and far between, black bears are thick on the ground in the Olympics.

And that was the problem.

Sometime after midnight he crawled out of his tent to urinate and a near paralyzing fear of the darkness struck him at once. He couldn’t see shit, not even stars. There was no ambient artificial light from a city in any direction. The nearest house was more than fifty miles away, and he was pretty sure the nearest town was in Canada. He turned on his flashlight, but it only cast a dirty yellow splotch on the underbrush. The rest of the world remained shrouded in pitch.

He might have felt okay had the forest been silent. At least he’d know a bear wasn’t stomping around somewhere nearby. But the forest was not silent. Water dripped from the trees in every direction. His ears seemed to work overtime since he couldn’t see. The part of his brainpower that normally processed sight was freed up to listen for sound. The dripping water sounded like an afternoon rainstorm. If a hungry 350-pound omnivore stepped on a branch somewhere nearby, maybe he’d hear it. But if a 350-pound omnivore sat on the path right in front him just waiting for Parker to get a little bit closer, he’d be torn to pieces by claws and by teeth the instant he bumbled into it.

He hurriedly pissed in the bushes and scrambled back to his tent.

The dark of the Olympic National Forest put a fright into him that was primal in its intensity. He didn’t think it was possible to be any more afraid of the dark than he was on that night in the forest, but he was wrong. He was so very wrong.

How many bears live in that forest? A couple of hundred at most? In the now-darkened cities of the Pacific Northwest, thousands of those
things
were loose on the streets.

Possibly hundreds of thousands.

And the nearest artificial light was on the international space station.

Parker was not going to leave the confines of his fortress unless he fucking well had to.

Hughes had figured out how to board it up without generating as much noise as a construction site. He blew up the used-car lot down the street. Hughes and Frank first doused the building with gasoline, but they dumped the lion’s share on the hoods of all the vehicles lined up out front. And they dropped a match.

The noise was unfuckingbelievable once the cars started exploding. It attracted hundreds of those things. They threw themselves into the flames like moths into a campfire. Most burned to death. Others were blown to pieces when the gas tanks ignited. None heard or otherwise noticed Parker and Kyle as they drove sixpenny nails into plywood and transformed their grocery store into a castle.

Parker was impressed with Hughes for coming up with that plan. It was a good idea, a big idea, and if Carol hadn’t been so freaked out by the explosions, it would have been fun.

He heard something outside, tiny and faint through the boarded-up windows, most likely Hughes’ truck. All sounds were magnified now. The silence of the earth itself seemed to make noise. Parker thought the “sound” of silence might be the onset of tinnitus in his ears, an incessant ringing that he never noticed before beneath the hum of civilization.

Or maybe what sounded like faint tinnitus was really just the sound of the earth, of insects crawling on pavement and grass, of drifting and subducting tectonic plates, of oozing magma miles below, and the hum of the planet’s magnetic field. Maybe he was just imagining things. Maybe silence itself had a sound that he never noticed before because silence had never existed.

Even the quietest night in his Seattle neighborhood had plenty of sounds: cars on the interstate, even though it was miles away; planes coming into the Sea-Tac airport from the East Coast and from Asia; trains on their way up to Vancouver in Canada; ships coming into Puget Sound from the ocean. All those things made noise. Even the wires in his house buzzed with electricity. Now there was nothing.

It was worse at night when absolute silence met absolute darkness in a world full of absolute danger. Those things were somewhere out in that void. Hundreds of thousands of them just waiting for stimulus.

But now he thought he heard Hughes’ truck somewhere in the distance.

“Is that them?” Carol said.

“Don’t know,” Parker said.

“It has to be them,” Kyle said. “They’re actually a little bit late, and we haven’t seen another person in days.”

Parker stood. Maybe that was Hughes and Frank’s truck and maybe it wasn’t. He picked up his freshly oiled Beretta M9.

Kyle picked up a hammer.

The vehicle pulled into the lot and stopped. Parker couldn’t see through the door since it was boarded up like the windows. He’d cut a tiny piece out of the plywood so he could reach the door’s locking mechanism, but that missing piece was only the size of the lock. He stood by the door and waited until he was sure it was Hughes and Frank outside before unlocking it.

Parker heard Hughes’ voice. “We need to get inside. Those things are attracted to noise. We got lucky before.”