What We Left Behind (14 page)

Jane’s hanging clothes out to dry on the back of a few chairs. She smiles. Jane has brightened with the warmth of the fire. Having an opportunity to stop and rest has revitalized her.

“Did you have a shower?” she asks, watching me unwind my towel-turban and drying my hair by the fire.

“Out on the balcony,” I reply. “It’s cold, but there’s shampoo.”

“Oooh,” she replies, and I can see the cogs turning in her mind.

David hands us a couple of plates.

“Thanks.”

In the flickering light of the fire, I can see that the plates have ornate patterns weaving their way around the rim. It seems such a shame. Something so beautiful wasted in the apocalypse.

David has soaked our beef jerky with a few vegetables we brought with us and thrown them into a steel pot, cooking them over the fire. The smell of a fresh stew wafts through the air. There’s salt and pepper on the table, which is a rarity back at the commune. I’m already salivating.

“I couldn’t get either the camp stove or the light to work,” he says. That’s disappointing, but the crackle of the fire is nice. I notice David has drawn the blinds, keeping the light from spilling out and attracting unwanted attention.

“This tastes wonderful,” I say, biting into some soft jerky. Steve mumbles in agreement with his mouth full.

“Did you find anything else of interest up there?” Jane asks.

“No, but Steve did,” I reply. Steve almost spits out his stew. Jane cocks her head, clearly wanting a little context, but I’ve embarrassed poor Steve enough already.

“Hey,” I say with a burst of excitement. “What about that gun?”

“Oh, no good,” David says. “No ammo. Wrong caliber. It would make a nice paperweight, but nothing more.”

“Bummer,” I reply.

“Can you imagine the early days?” Jane asks, sitting on the couch. “Back when you could still find processed food.”

“Like Twinkies?” I ask.

“Like beer!” David says with a bit too much vigor for a teen who's not supposed to have had any alcohol yet. McKenzie’s moonshine still is the worst-kept secret in the commune.

“What about wine?” I ask. “If we could find some wine bottles they would still be good. That stuff keeps for decades.”

“I looked,” David replies. He doesn’t need to say any more.

Jane says, “I was thinking about candy bars, soda, ice cream, crap like that.”

“Shut up,” I say, joking. Suddenly, my stew doesn’t taste all that great.

Jane laughs, rattling off, “Doritos, Pringles, Lays.”

“La, la, la,” I say, pretending to put my fingers in my ears. “I can’t hear you.”

“And coffee,” Steve adds.

“You didn’t have coffee as a kid,” I reply.

“I did.”

“My dad wouldn’t—” I begin, but that thought collapses.

My dad loved coffee. Sadness washes over me. The others realize those few words have stirred something painful inside me and the conversation dies. There’s silence for a moment, almost out of respect for my fallen father. It seems silly, but no one knows what to say. There’s a memory associated with everything we left behind.

“Tell me something funny,” Jane finally says, breaking the tension. She’s looking at David.

“What? Me?”

David looks confused about being put on the spot.

Jane adds, “Isn’t that what teens do? Sit around a campfire swapping stories?”

Steve pipes up with, “Ghost stories.”

Jane and I shout in unison, “No ghost stories!”

David laughs.

“You’re supposed to be making me laugh,” Jane protests.

“OK,” Steve says. “How’s this? In the early days, dad and I are out looking for Missy and mom. We’re at one of those collection points, you know, the ones where people post photos, leave messages, arrange meetings and stuff.”

We all nod. We all know those rally points too well.

“Dad is stressing out, which is freaking me out. I think we’ll never see mom or Missy again.

“Anyway, our home is in a quarantine zone, so we can’t get back there to get any photos of mom to pin on the wall.

“Dad’s got his phone. Somehow, he gets it charged, but everything backs up to the cloud. Only there’s no Internet cloud anymore. The only photos on his phone are of us. We’d been fooling around in the museum when Zee swept through Chicago.”

Chicago is about nine hours north of us by car. Steve’s a long way from home. I can’t imagine how many evac routes and devastated camps lie between here and there. It’s amazing he made it this far. At a guess, he lost his family somewhere close by, as I can’t imagine a teenage boy traveling all that way on foot alone.

There was talk of the islands of the Caribbean escaping the plague, driving millions to the south, but like so many rumors in the early days, it was a lie that led to untold suffering and grief.

“There are pictures of us monkeying around with cavemen and stuff. Dad wants to put up a photo, so he gets the sheriff to print out a photo of us standing beside the skeleton of a
T. rex
and sticks it on the wall.”

I’m waiting for the funny part.

“He wrote something on the back of the picture, directions to where we were staying or something. Anyway, mom finds the photo and thinks my uncle must have posted it after we went missing. She’s heartbroken. She can’t bring herself to take the photo down so she never turns it over to see the message on the back. Mom checks the register of missing persons to see if we’ve been found, only we were never registered as missing—she was. She thinks we’re dead.”

Steve laughs, “Anyway, about a month later we’re shuffling between camps as the evac gets underway. They’re grouping survivors by last name so she gets assigned to the same camp as us, same section but about five rows over. Dad wakes up one morning, sits up on the edge of his cot, and mom’s sitting there staring back at him from the other side of the gym. Neither of them can believe it. They wave. I remember thinking, who’s dad waving at?”

He laughs again.

“That’s a beautiful story,” I say, resting my hand on Steve’s knee.

“Yeah,” Jane says softly.

David nods.

No one laughs.

The conversation lightens and we sit there bullshitting for quite a while, watching the fire burn down.

Jane brings out a pile of blankets and sheets from the linen closet. She dumps them on the table saying, “So . . . there’s four of us and only three bedrooms.”

I’m immediately thinking about who’s going to sleep downstairs when David says, “We’ll take the master bedroom.”

I glance at Jane. She’s grinning from ear to ear.

“Dead girl’s bed?” I say, raising an eyebrow. “Really?”

Jane laughs, walking off with some sheets and blankets.

David winks, saying, “We’ll leave you two to figure out which room you want.”

“Rooms,” I say, emphasizing the plural.

Jane and David disappear around the corner. They run up the stairs like school kids, which I guess they are, yelling and screaming about getting wet in the rain still dripping from the collapsed roof.

I start to say something to Steve, wondering how awkward this is going to get, but he beats me to the punch. He rests his hand gently on my shoulder as he walks past my chair.

“Night, Haze.”

And with that I’m left alone with the crackling, dying fire.

I sit there lost in thought.

We’re alive.

We’ve made it through the first day. Just.

We were attacked by zombies, but no one was bitten. And that’s when reality strikes. We could have died out there. Rather than sitting here in the warmth of this old home, our cold, lifeless bodies could be lying in a ditch somewhere like poor Deanne.

I feel sick.

If Jane or I had been bitten, David would have put a bullet through our skulls. He would have had to, or at the very least, he would have left us to do the job ourselves. But I’m pretty sure he would have come back and checked the task was done properly. It would have broken his heart, but he would have done it. He’ll make a good marauder.

A shiver runs down my spine.

My socks have dried, but my shoes are still damp, so I leave them by the fire.

The old house isn’t scary anymore.

Rain falls gently, tapping on the windows. The wooden clapboards creak with the wind. There’s still water on the marble floor by the front door. I walk toward the stairwell with a couple of blankets draped over my arm, my feet dipping in and out of the cold water, but the house feels warm. The four of us have given these old walls an infusion of life.

Like the others, I race up the stairs trying to avoid the rain dripping from above.

Two of the bedroom doors are closed. One is open. I guess that’s where I’m sleeping. I walk into the room, stretch a sheet over the mattress and curl up beneath a blanket, but I can’t get to sleep. My mind is still racing from the events of the day and I find myself anticipating worse tomorrow. The more I think about things, the more tense my body becomes, and I find myself tossing and turning, trying to get comfortable, unable to get warm.

Back in the commune, everyone shares a room. This should be a treat, but it’s not. Why am I sleeping alone?

Quietly, I creep out into the hallway and open the door to Steve’s room.

The clouds are clearing. Moonlight streams in through the windows. It’s later than I thought.

“Hey,” I whisper, standing in the doorway. “Are you awake?”

There’s no answer.

In the soft light, I can see Steve lying there facing the window. Slowly, I peel back the blanket and slide in beside him.

Steve turns with a start. He reaches for his gun on the nightstand, but pulls back when he realizes it’s me.

“Hazel???”

“Shhh,” I say, kissing him on the lips.

Well, I meant to kiss him on the lips. I’m not sure if I connected with his cheek or his chin in the dark, which is a bit embarrassing, but he doesn’t seem to mind. He kisses me with far better precision. Our tongues touch playfully.

We’re both clothed so not much is going to happen, but it feels wonderful to lie there in his arms. His fingers run gently down my neck, along the back of my arms and down my thighs. I’m pretty sure he’d be happy enough to take things further, and I would too, but the thought of having a child in nine months’ time is like a bucket of cold water thrown over me. I’m too young to be a mom. Steve seems to sense that, I’m not sure how, but there must be something in my body language as he kisses me lightly on the lips and says, “It’s okay.”

I’m vaguely aware I stiffened as he touched my hips. That must have been his cue.

Steve pulls his hand away, so I take hold of his fingers.

“It’s just . . .”

“Too soon?” he whispers softly.

“Yes.”

I feel bad saying that, and even in the soft light, I can’t quite look him in the eye. I focus on his lips. I don’t mean to tease Steve. I suspect it’s torture for him to contain himself, but he does, and that makes him all the more attractive in my mind. Who would have thought there were gentlemen in the zombie apocalypse?

Steve runs his hand playfully through my hair. I think that’s his way of letting me know he understands.

Lying there, I’m suddenly aware of a sound other than the wind and the rain. There’s a slow, steady creaking coming from the next bedroom. A soft rhythmic squeak resounds through the old house.

“Oh, God. Is that?”

“Yep.”

“That is so embarrassing.”

“Yep.”

We both laugh, and I wonder if David and Jane can hear us.

Steve rests his hand gently on my neck as we kiss, but I’ve got the giggles. I can’t help myself. I kiss him passionately, trying to stave off a fit of laughter. I simply cannot help but chuckle as the squeaking noise grows ever louder.

“Those springs are going to break.”

“Or the floorboards,” Steve says and I burst out laughing. Finally, the bouncing stops and the house falls silent.

Steve strokes my hair. I run my hand gently around his face and down over his chest.

“Thank you,” I say.

“For what?” he asks, with an innocence only Steve could muster.

“For everything. For today. For tonight.”

“For tomorrow?”

I laugh, “For all our tomorrows.”

Steve smiles and kisses me.

We lie there staring at each other in the soft light until we both fall asleep.

In the morning, I wake to find Steve with his arm around my waist.

The door opens and Jane sticks her head in, saying, “Well, look at you two love birds.”

Steve throws a pillow at her.

Steve refills our canteens with the rainwater that collected in a variety of pots and pans overnight. Rainwater is all we can drink. Anything else could be contaminated. It’s a low degree of risk, but a risk few are willing to take, including me. Having fresh rainwater is good as it means we can preserve our supplies, but it also means my pack is going to get heavier, not lighter.

David and I walk out into the bright sunlight to be greeted by growls from a pack of zombies. There are easily twenty or thirty of them gathered outside the wrought-iron fence. I’ve been staring at them out the window while waiting for the others to pack up, watching as their numbers have slowly increased.

David doesn’t seem bothered by them, and I’m interested to see how mister zombie whisperer is going to deal with them.
Don
’t sweat it, don
’t sweat it
, was all he’d say while we were inside, so I’m intensely curious to see what he has in mind. Another zombie stumbles up the hill to join the pack.

“What’s the plan?” I ask as Jane opens an upstairs window and throws out our sheets and blankets. “Are we going to fight our way out?”

“You’ve been watching them,” David says as a sheet drifts onto the wet grass. “You tell me. What have you learned about them?”

“Learned?” I didn’t think there was anything to learn.

Steve wanders over to join us, yawning as though a horde of ravenous zombies baying for blood was entirely natural and somewhat mundane.

“Are we boring you?” I ask.

“Hah,” Steve replies, and I get the feeling he didn’t have as good a night’s sleep as I did.