The Reanimates (Book 3): The Escape (18 page)

"Yeah, you can."

Trisha was stumbling with words, and finally I understood that with her jumbled words she was asking if the room was acceptable. I nodded, silently letting her know that I took care of it. I looked up at Tyreese and Tanya who were sobbing in the corner. They didn't want to see their son in this much pain and they loved Shayla like a daughter, and there was no way to know how long they would have their granddaughter with them. I didn't know what to say. I was standing there covered in the blood of their daughter-in-law, and I wanted to help them but I was without words. Tanya came to me and wrapped her arms around my neck in a hug, and sobbed on my shoulder. I hugged her back, and that's how we stood for a while.

When DaWayne was done saying goodbye, he came out of the bedroom. Tanya and Tyreese went in to say goodbye. I took the baby from DaWayne and checked her over. I put my pinkie in her mouth to see if she had a sucking reflex. She didn't try to suck on my finger. I decided to wait until I had a bottle to worry if she was struggling with a reflex issue. DaWayne asked me how Charity was doing. I was amazed by her strength. I told him that I was impressed with her, and he sighed.

"That's something at least. God, this wasn't what I thought would happen. We were supposed to be starting a family. Now I'm burying my wife." New tears sprung up in his eyes. "We were supposed to be safe here, Cali. We were supposed to be safe."

I was staring at the floor. I felt like shit that I couldn't save her. I kept thinking I failed them. I didn't know what else to do and she died because of my ineptitude.

"I gotta get some air. Hey, Cali, thanks for trying. And thanks for saving my daughter. I'm grateful I had the chance to meet her." My ears flushed. I still felt like I was a failure. As though he read my mind, he said "If you were gone, or whatever, I'd be burying them both right now. I'd never have held her. You gave me that." He stepped through the door and closed it behind him.

I sighed as I tried to process what he said when Trisha came in the room. I was feeling the weight of the day on me, and so was Trisha. When I looked up at her, a horrible realization wiped over me.

"Oh, no," I said, "I don't think Sawyer knows about this."
Trisha groaned. "He is going to go nuts. I would if it was DaWayne that died. Ugh. Cali, um, it might be better if I break the news. Sister factor, you know."

I looked down at the sleeping baby in my arms. "Take Trent with you."

Trisha nodded then started towards the door.

"Trish, let Trent know what happened, too." She nodded as she realized he was outside the whole time and didn't have a clue about what happened. She nodded solemnly.

When I was alone, I was still standing with this peanut of a baby. I was trying to disassociate from the waves of emotion that I was feeling, so I hid under the nurse hat. I pulled up a mental checklist of things that this baby was going to need to have a fighting chance. It occurred to me that babies are used to a super warm environment. Charity was super thin and didn't have a layer of fat to keep her warm. I piled wood left over from the cold winter into the fireplace and found a match. Once I had the fire burning, I sat on the hearth, rocking the baby back and forth trying to make sure she was warm enough. While I rocked her, my heart broke over and over again, all the people that we lost were circling my head and I was lost in the grief. Images of Shayla lying on the bed, wanting her baby to make it, accepting the end of her road-- all of it swirled through my head. It shouldn't have been over. This isn’t how it should have ended.

Great sobs racked through me, and I was consumed by my tears.

We needed to leave this place. We needed to go somewhere where pregnant people didn't die trying to bring a person into the world, where brothers didn't lose sisters, where husbands didn't lose wives to the hungry dead, where kids didn't have to wonder if they just saw their mom or dad for the last time. I couldn't bear the thought that this was the life Drew was destined to live.

We had to go.

The Flotilla

We buried Shayla under the tree where she and DaWayne had their first kiss. The little white flowers that blossomed on the branches let their petals fall on the breeze, coming to rest on the fresh mound of upturned dirt. Trent built a cross and carved Shayla's name in the horizontal part. DaWayne looped a necklace over the cross, and the crystal pendant swayed in the soft breeze, spraying rainbows when it swayed into the sunlight. It was a beautiful day, too nice to be burying someone. We lowered her simple wood casket into the hole in relative silence, with only the birds singing her off.

There was an amazing lack of words that described how we felt that day. Her eulogy was short, and the moment of silence was long, the lack of words lingering long after the funeral was over.

We buried Charity next to her mother two days later. Charity died in her father's arms after we did twenty minutes of CPR. I wanted to keep breathing for her forever, but her heart didn't seem to want to play along. Charity was our grasping at straws, our last ditch effort at making the tragedy of Shayla's death bearable. We all crumbled under the weight of her death. It amazed me that a person we had only known for a couple of days could make such an impact on everyone, and this person who was so tiny left such a major hole in our hearts. Seeing that miniature coffin, no bigger than a shoe box, going into the ground was close to unbearable and it shook me to the core. I thought that we were past deaths like these, but they kept coming. If we weren't being eaten, we were dying from stupid infections and childbirth.

Sawyer was devastated with the loss of his sister, his confidant, his best friend. He was withdrawn and miserable. When his sister got married, he moved in with Matt and after she was gone he felt lost and wasn't sure that he wanted to stay in our group anymore. He walked like a lost soul, the only survivor of his family, and he was unreachable in his grief. Erin tried to help, she understood what it was to lose people, but she couldn't reach him. People tried to help, from both groups, but it wasn't until Matt took him fishing that we saw any flicker that anyone broke through. I'll never know what they talked about on their trip to the creek, but they were gone for hours and when they returned, both of their eyes were red rimmed. I guess the talk helped though, because he did stay with us, but he wasn't the same. None of us were. There was no way to come back from that.

Trent worked harder to make the radio work. Anything he found that he thought could boost the signal he used. Trent spent every waking hour making small adjustments in his antennas and trying across all the bands again. He talked to many people in his search for the elusive New York group, and they all talked about their experiences in their camps, but they weren't New York. It helped a little to hear Trent tell me about the lives that the other people were living. Most of them were having a harder go of things than we were. Disease was turning out to be a bigger fight than anyone imagined it would be. It was funny how we were surviving the zombies that threatened to wipe out everyone, but were failing to survive the things we had survived before the start of this.

In the months following the deaths of Shayla and Charity, the town was struggling. The absence of hope was palpable. We tried to resurrect the enthusiasm we used to have to no avail. We felt like every day we were waiting for the pendulum to swing and take another person from us.

We tried to find distractions for our hurt. Tanya had rearranged a lot of the crops, and like in the complex, she planted a memorial garden to honor the lives that were lost. DaWayne donated the arbor from his wedding to the memorial garden and he and his mother often sat in silence on a stone bench that we found in one of the backyards. It was a peaceful place, but it didn't fill the void.

I was spending more time on the wall than I had before. Shooting zombies, while a nice distraction, didn't fill that space in my chest like I hoped it would. While sitting up there, I whittled new arrows from branches and became really good at making my arrows land exactly where I wanted them to. When the packs of zombies were thinned out, I would go and reclaim the arrows so we would be able to have a good cache of ammunition for the next round, because there were always going to be more. I wondered where they all came from; I was sure that our group alone had to have wiped out the population of the entire northwest, but it still never seemed like enough.

Nothing I did felt like enough.

Drew and I spent a fair amount of time with Trent in the radio room. Trent was much better at knowing where his signal would bounce, and had a good idea that if he used what he learned in all the other connections that he should be getting close to the New England area. It amazed me that angling an antenna in a certain way could bounce off some mountain that bounced off another thing until it landed where you wanted, like a bizarre game of billiards. Trent told me tales of people getting in contact with other people in Australia by bouncing signals off of the moon and stuff. It was a radio, and it was weird to think of the radio waves being things that could be manipulated.

I learned how to crochet from Kristen, and I had been working on a huge granny square blanket that had all of the colors of the rainbow in it, in order of the color spectrum, with the purple in the center. I was on the yellow part of the blanket so I was feeling like I had actually made progress on this project. It felt quaint that we were back to the days where being able to crochet was a good skill to have. I listened to the endless buzz of static as I wound the colored yarn around the hook in careful stitches while Drew read another science fiction story. I wondered what it was that made him like the stories of the robots and space craft so much. I had a theory that he wanted to remember the way the future was heading before the zombie hiccup. I wanted to forget about the promise of surgical robots and other worlds, personally. I wanted to pretend that the idea of a robot apocalypse where the programming was suddenly self-aware was just as ludicrous as the idea of zombies.

We had been sitting in the radio room for a couple of hours when my eyes were feeling dry and heavy and my hands were cramping from holding the yarn just right. Drew was also growing restless in reading, so since we were both tired, I decided to wrap up the row I had been working on and call it a night. I had just completed my last stitch when the static noise changed.
I was puzzled by the change in the pitch and I searched Trent's eyes to find out why it had changed. My husband's face was beaming with excitement. He clutched the microphone in his hand and with his thumb, he pushed the talk button down. "Wilsall, calling. Come back?" He waited for a moment, his foot tapping the floor with the impatience of a child who was told to wait to open his Christmas presents before he adjusted a dial and tried again.
 

He gently tweaked the fine knobs, and announced himself again.

He repeated the process a few times, and I was beginning to feel like the excitement that I was feeling was a bit premature as waves of doubt began to build up in my head. I wanted the radio to work, but I started questioning the realistic odds in connecting with the other side of the country. The Ham radio wasn't a cellphone and it certainly wasn't the Internet. Hailing different parts of the country wasn't really that realistic. It couldn't be.

Out of nowhere, a voice came out of the speaker. It was garbled and indistinct, but it was there. I looked over to my son to see if he heard it too. His mouth hung open in a gentle 'O' as he leaned closer to the radio. I hadn't imagined it. There was someone there.

"Repeat your transmission, please," Trent begged into the microphone, his eyes pleaded for another chance to hear the voice to be real and happen again.

"Flotilla East, we copy you, Wilsall."

We cheered for a second as Trent clicked the talk button down to speak with this stranger. There was a good chance that we hadn't connected with the right people, we had connected with people all over the country, after all, but the voice said 'Flotilla East' and that had to mean east coast, didn't it?

"Flotilla East, my name is Trent Anglin. I am a part of a survivor base in Wilsall, Montana. I have been trying to connect with the people that are running survivors to a safe zone that we learned about from Dr. Hiller of the ISS. Do you have any information that will help us in our search for this group?"

"Mr. Anglin, my name is Desmond Lloyd. I am a communications officer with Flotilla East. We are a group of ships that have been trying to assist survivors with relocation and protection. Dr. Hiller has been an incredible ally to our group in giving hope to other survivors, and I am glad to hear that you have met him.

"We are based out of the Port of New York. Allow me to explain a little bit about our group. I want to start by saying we are not affiliated with the government, but we are operating with the support of the US Coast Guard. We learned of a flotilla in Long Beach that were using their boats in rescue operations and we are modeling our group after what we learned in their attempts that they have been gracious enough to share with us. They created a floating city for those with access to boats, but for those that don't have boats, we have this as an alternative. We were able to negotiate an agreement with the country of Ireland to accept people from multiple countries that have survived the effects of Shelton's Virus. Ireland, as I am sure you are aware, had a very minor outbreak of Shelton's before they closed their borders and gained the upper hand and eradicated the problem. They are now a thriving community of people that are maintaining a normal life. They have an excellent community of doctors, law enforcement, educators, and they are living a close to normal life.

"There are some terms to the agreement that people will have to accept before boarding one of our freighters, but they are straightforward. For instance, we will not be admitting people that have been injured by an infected person in any way, symptomatic or not. Passengers will have to submit to an exam by one of our medical staff prior to boarding and once we make port in Ireland, you will be in quarantine for an additional week before you are assigned housing. You will be expected to abide by the rules of the ship for the safety of everyone, and the rules are basic common sense rules, and once you enter Ireland, you will be expected to follow the laws of the land.

"If you are agreeable to the conditions mentioned, the only thing you will need to do is to be in New York. A ship leaves on the third Thursday of every month, at nine in the morning, local time, from the Manhattan Cruise Terminal. If you miss the boat, you will have to wait until the next boat leaves a month later. There are no exceptions. We do this for the safety and best possible transportation of everyone.

"Is this something that you would be interested in doing?"

"Yes! We would be very interested in traveling with you. You have no idea." Trent was bouncing up and down in joy as he responded. This was exactly what we had been waiting for.

"Alright, then. You know the deal, Port of New York. Be safe in your travels and good luck. Lloyd, out."

The static resumed as he disconnected the call, and the soft hiss was the only sound left in the room.

We had been waiting for this moment for what felt like an eternity, and now we had made contact with them. We knew for a fact that there were people out there that were making it possible to live a normal life. There was a way to move forward with this dream of being back with people and civilization and resources.
I had stopped believing in the hope that we would find these guys. I hadn't realized I gave up until I was listening to this man talk to us, this wonder that we were actually talking to people that would make it possible to relocate was bordering the discovery that Santa Claus was actually real.

I couldn't wait to tell the others. We were going to be able to plan something again. We weren't going to be just sitting there waiting for the next disaster; we were going to be moving on. We were going to be able to put the pieces back together and start again. Drew's science fiction stories had a possibility of being real in a place where people didn't have to stop to take out a pack of roaming monsters.

We had a reason to keep going.

We held a meeting in the school to discuss how we were going to get everyone to New York. As it turned out, not everyone was as interested in the idea of leaving for a cross country trek. We assumed that everyone was as overwhelmed with the life we put together as we were, and just as anxious to get out of it. When we started the meeting in the cafeteria of the school, a place that we had taken to using as our community center, everyone had gathered to see what Trent and I were so excited about. It was almost like people were expecting that we were going to tell them that there was rescue or something, and to Trent and me, there was. To us, Ireland was the beacon of hope that we always imagined we would find. When we told the group about the flotilla that would transport us there, the responses were incredibly mixed. Some were talking excitedly, while others were less than enthusiastic.

The biggest question was about how we would move everyone there. There certainly wasn't enough fuel to drive across the country. We had to wonder at times if we were going to have enough fuel to get to the trade meets and if we were going to be able to trade enough to come back. DaWayne asked how possible it could be to make a wagon train like they did in the old days, and I thought that was a great idea. My brain started thinking about the logistics of how long it would take to cross the country with a pack of horses pulling a wagon.