What Once We Feared (3 page)

He picked it up, held it out to me. It wasn’t easy to line up the tip of it against the woman’s eye. Her lids were open, the irises visible, and I didn’t want to see, but I had to.

It took more force than I thought it would, and all the while the woman struggled, snapping her teeth at me. Terror clogged my throat, infiltrated my lungs like smoke. I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think, couldn’t force my muscles to move the way they needed to.

Her eyeball compressed but held firm. I tried using momentum but I was shaking too hard, and each time I tried to bring the tip of the pool cue down I missed the socket. Nicky was fully sobbing at this point and the elevator doors were still trying to close; their alarms screamed.

“Just do it!” Nicky screeched.

And I did. Letting go of the chair, I wrapped both hands around the pool cue and I jammed it into the dead woman’s eye with all the force of my body weight and then some. There was a sickening pop that I felt more than heard as the tip of the cue jerked down, sinking through the bone of her orbital socket and then her brain.

The woman choked out one last moan as I twisted the cue, moving it back and forth like it was a shovel loosening dirt.

I know there was still sound, but in my head there was silence. A soft, stuffy kind like you see on TV when a character’s hearing goes out after an explosion. Everyone else sat stunned, staring at me.

Maybe I expected to see some sort of admiration. A moment of unity that we’re all in this together—that it wasn’t me alone who’d killed this woman, but me acting on behalf of a team.

Except that wasn’t what I found. I knew they were grateful. I knew they understood that I’d saved their lives. But that couldn’t keep the horror from their eyes. The disgust.

Later they’d rally around me and Felipe would start joking about it. And once, when we
pried open the door to the neighbor’s wine closet, he and Gregor would act it all out again and we’d laugh (Beatrice would already be gone by then).

But in that moment there was just a sound-softened silence. All of them staring at me like
I
was the monster.

“Help me get him up,” Nicky finally murmured to Felipe, and together they helped Gregor to his feet. A thin trickle of blood smeared the back of his neck, and it took him a minute to become steady.

We left the woman in the little vestibule by the elevators for the time being. It felt strange to abandon her there like that. She looked so exposed—no longer a monster but the victim of some cruel and sadistic murder. Before catching up with the others, I flipped the chair over in an attempt to cover her ravaged face.

Nicky’s father’s place was at the far end of the building, one of a pair of apartments that jutted toward Uptown like a finger pointing at the city. The door opened onto a long rectangular room with the kitchen first, the dining room in the middle, and an awkwardly shaped living room at the other end.

Hardwood gleamed along the floor, the far wall nothing but floor-to-ceiling windows bordering a pair of sliding doors that opened onto a wide balcony. Beyond was a spectacular view of Uptown, the afternoon sun glaring off a sea of office buildings.

A set of double doors off the living room led to the master suite: a massive space with a king-sized bed and full sitting area flanking another wall of windows, a huge walk-in closet, and a marble bathroom that boasted both a Jacuzzi and walk-in shower. Next to the kitchen was a hallway that led to another full bathroom, a bedroom (Nicky’s room, I guessed, though it was about as personalized as a hotel), and an office.

Outside was chaos, but inside a sort of odd calm settled around us. The dissipation of adrenaline left us drained and worn. Something inside Nicky must have clicked into “hostess” mode—maybe it made her feel normal to offer us something to drink and eat. As if this were any ordinary day and we were just hanging out after school.

We tried calling home using both our cell phones and the land line, but the system must have been overloaded, because we could never get through (only Gregor would get the chance to speak to his parents again, and he refused to tell us anything about the conversation. He just hung up the phone and stepped out onto the balcony, where he screamed and screamed and screamed).

Beyond that, no one really had much to say. We barely made eye contact as we shuffled through the unfamiliar rooms. Suddenly, we became oddly polite, apologizing in soft voices if we had to maneuver around one another to get to the bathroom or ask for a towel.

As the day wore on, we each retreated to separate areas, as though marking out territory. Gregor lay on the master bed with an ice pack on his head, while Beatrice drifted into the guest room, closing the door behind her. All of us could hear her sobbing, but none of us knew what to say.

Ultimately, Felipe ended up in the office, which looked more like central command than anything else. One wall held four televisions, and he tuned them all to different channels. The computer had three screens, and he quickly filled them with an array of news blogs, obsessively refreshing and following links for more information.

Nicky staked her claim on the balcony outside, tucking herself into an Adirondack chair with a quilt wrapped around her shoulders and her back to the windows. I had no idea how she was doing: if she was awake or asleep, crying or praying.

I couldn’t settle anywhere. I tried sitting on the couch, but my mind roared with action plans. So much needed to be done, and every time I thought of something new I added it to my mental list, which was shaped like a pinwheel and kept spinning and spinning and spinning.

There were so many variables, so many calculations to make, that all of it felt like quicksand. We needed to gather food, but how urgent that was depended on how long the electricity lasted and how quickly the food in the fridges spoiled. Nicky had mentioned that some of the building’s power came from solar panels mounted on the roof, but who knew how much that would help?

We needed to figure out what to do about the guy down the hall. He was clearly infected,
but how long would it be until he turned? How long did we have to figure out how to kill him and build up the nerve to follow through with it?

My mind flicked through possibilities like a deck of cards: we could us a knife, a hammer, a baseball bat. We could search the other apartments for a gun. But how would we get access to the other places? The doors were reinforced with steel. (In the end we cut through the walls, tunneling from room to room. It turned out that the couple down the hall had a loaded revolver in their bedside table, but by the time we found it, it was too late—Gregor and I had already taken care of the infected guy with a carving knife and a nine iron.)

I needed to find bike chains to double-lock the gates on the stairs, I needed to find buckets and bowls to fill with water, I needed to find a way to paint “5/Alive” on a sheet and hang it out the window, as the news instructed. I needed to figure out if there were pets in the other apartments and what to do with them.

My mind wheeled down all the various paths our lives were about to take, parsing the possibilities, finding the holes and stuffing them with solutions that were the wrong shape and size no matter how tantalizingly right they appeared. There were so many “if … then” possibilities that any attempt to figure out the future fractured under the weight of uncertainty.

And when dawn finally broke, I knew I’d followed the thread of every eventuality and they all led to the same knotted end.

Stepping out onto the balcony was like stepping into another world. This side of the building jutted out from a sloping bank, so the drop to the ground was much farther than I’d expected. At the bottom of the hill sat a concrete barrier topped by a fence that bordered the southern stretch of the interstate loop around Uptown.

Car alarms blared, horns blasted, people screamed. The air smelled of blood and ash, pain and despair. Down the road flames blazed and smoke billowed from a twisted pile of metal that used to be an eighteen-wheeler and who knows how many cars. A few industrious souls tried to thread their way through on foot, bikes, or motorcycles.

But the fences along the interstate were like the walls of the shore, keeping the tide of
living dead from escaping. From my vantage point so many stories up, it was easy to recognize that those people trapped on the road had little chance of surviving. But they didn’t know that yet. They couldn’t see what I did: the churning storm of dead less than a mile away.

I cupped my hands around my mouth and shouted a warning. Nicky stirred behind me: “I tried already—it won’t work. Even if they hear you, they won’t listen.” Her voice was listless, scratchy.

It crawled under my skin. Because I knew she was right and that she wasn’t just talking about the poor souls on the road below. She was talking about all of us. We were fooling ourselves into thinking that by continuing the struggle we could somehow survive. That that was all it took, the act of struggle somehow a guarantee of success.

But that didn’t mean we didn’t have our own storm of dead to face down the road. Just because we were safer didn’t mean we were safe.

The thing was, Nicky had suddenly stopped playing by the rules, and that made me angry. The rule was that she pretended we could be okay. That was her role in all of this: hopeful survivor.

“What, so you’re just gonna give up?” I failed to keep from sneering, and so I kept my back to her, my hands clenched around the wide railing along the balcony. She didn’t answer, which made it worse.

I needed a fight. Because of the itch I could never scratch, the need to
do
in a world where doing had become impossible. The rest of them found ways to contend with this new reality (well, until Beatrice jumped and the fall didn’t kill her—that was the beginning of the end for Felipe).

For me, I held on by planning the next move and the one after that. And the truth was, I already saw where it ended. In my mind I could picture every path, every eventuality, and they all led to one place: the storm of zombies waiting.

We had no hope. The conclusion was written. The last line had been carved in stone and our judgment handed down. There was no appeal, no do-over. The moment we’d stepped into the
Overlook we’d chosen our path, and we’d chosen wrong.

It would take us a long time to get there—longer than I’d even realized at first. The building had an elaborate roof garden with a saltwater pool. Early on we rigged a ladder to get up there, and thanks to a retiree with an odd penchant for collecting seed packets, we were able to plant a vegetable patch that was pretty successful.

But on that first morning at the Overlook there was this moment when I was standing on the balcony with Nicky and the rising sun hit the pink-tinted windows of an apartment building a few blocks south. And suddenly, everything around us turned rosy; the world became soft and beautiful.

Nicky pulled me down into the chair next to her and she tilted her head back and I did the same. “When you only look at the sky,” she whispered, “it’s like nothing’s changed.”

And she was right. The wall of the balcony blocked the chaos below—I could no longer see the wrecks or the carnage. In that rose-tinged heartbeat, there existed a flutter of hope. I could see it in Nicky’s eyes—that what she’d said earlier wasn’t really true. Being the hopeful survivor wasn’t just a role. She didn’t believe in giving up, which is something I wouldn’t come to fully understand until much, much later, when her raw-ribbed chest rattled and wheezed.

I’d come onto the balcony that morning to give her the chance to circumvent it all: change her decision and choose a new path. She could fly over the railing or take the elevator down to the main level or find any other number of ways to determine her own ending.

All I could see were the ways our world had fallen apart, but somehow Nicky had found a way to show me that in some respects it was still the same, and it could be beautiful.

At the very end she would take it all back, of course. When death was no longer a promise but a pressing reality, I asked her if she regretted this dawn-inspired commitment to survival. Her answer had been a simple yes. That if she’d had it to do over again, knowing that rescue would never come, she’d have killed herself on that first morning.

And then she was gone and it was just me. The only one who’d never really hoped. The one who’d never seen the Overlook as some sort of waiting room before life resumed as it had
once been. The one who understood that our world hadn’t been put on pause but shifted into a new reality and that days would continue to come and go, piling on one another as they always had.

I’d known from the beginning what Nicky had understood only at the very end. But just because I’d seen the truth from day one didn’t mean I needed to force her and the others to see it too. Because there’s something I learned in that sliver of pink sunrise: we all come into the world knowing we’re going to die. And maybe I’d figured out that our death would come sooner and it would come harder, but that didn’t make it any more or less inevitable.

And it didn’t mean there wasn’t something worthwhile about those days in between—the good and the bad of them. The kisses and the fights and the fears and the laughter. I was done with fearing death and I was done with fearing regret. I’d made my choices. Maybe they’d been the wrong ones, but I intended to live them to the end.