Zombie Ever After (24 page)

He rose and stretched. Every muscle in his body ached. This whole catastrophe over the past few days had been like participating in a hundred back-to-back triathlons. Took its toll.
 

He helped Cathren to her feet, and she stretched, too—only her stretching resembled yoga moves, whereas Donovan’s had been rather herky-jerky like the Tin Man doing the robot dance. When Cathren finished her workout, she reached around through the bars with her massive key ring and unlocked the cell door.
 

They both headed for the stairs, listening for any activity below before descending. They made their way down the spiral staircase warily since they had no weapons. Even Cathren, who appeared to have lost her extraordinary powers for the time being, was not an asset. They were sitting ducks, or to be more accurate, wandering ducks.

At the first floor, they listened again. Silence. All quiet on the zombie front. They proceeded with haste toward the double-door exit by which they’d entered the night before.

“Wait,” said Cathren. She took her key ring, flipped to the big skeleton key, and locked the inside door behind them. “Just in case. You never know.”
 

“Good thinking. Should slow them down, if nothing else.”
 

Outside, the sky was as dull as ever: a damp, gummy gray. Thick churning fog had rolled in and most of the grounds were hidden beneath its shroud.

“This isn’t good,” Donovan said, scanning the area around him. “This damn fog puts us at a definite tactical disadvantage.”
 

“Why not just say this whole thing sucks, General Washington?” Cathren said.
 

They stood in silence, Donovan distracted for the moment, rubbing his stubble and biting his lower lip, until at last he spoke, almost as if he was talking to himself. “We need to find something we can use as a weapon, that’s the thing. Something to slash, smash—”
 

“—or stab with,” Cathren interjected.

“Yeah. That’s right. Let’s move carefully. Follow me and keep your ears and eyes wide open,” Donovan said. They tip-toed along like Shaggy and Velma.

“You spot anything?” Cathren whispered to Donovan.

“Nope, nothing,” he whispered back.

“What’s that—up ahead?” she said.

Donovan squinted into the miasma. “One of the outer buildings, I think. Yes. I can only make out the roof jutting up out of the fog. I can’t say for sure yet, but it seems to be in pretty good shape.”
 

“Oh, I hope it has a kitchen, or if not, at least kitchen-y stuff,” she said. “Would solve two problems at once: nutrition and defense.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Knives, babe. Butcher, steak, and carving ones. I’m hoping to find at least a small steak knife for the taking. And I don’t care what kind of grub we find or when the expiration date is, either. If there’s food, I’m eating it.”

“I agree on both counts,” Donovan said. “Food and weapons. Let’s go.”
 

Donovan and Cathren made their way toward the building, their hearts pounding. They kept a keen ear out for anything sounding even vaguely “zombie—
esque.”
But they didn’t catch a thing, merely the slapping of the waves against the Rock. The fog collected in such thick banks they could only view the area at arm’s length around them.

“Cathren, stay right behind me. We can’t be sure this place is zombie-free,” Donovan muttered.

She remained silent, which, at this point, was a first-rate strategy. Donovan kept creeping on, like a blind man in mousetrap factory.
 

“We’ve almost made it, I think,” Donovan whispered. “Stay close.”
 

Cathren kept silent. Again, excellent job. He reached back for her hand.

There was no hand.

He turned around. Not only was her hand missing, but the rest of her was, too.

“Cathren!” he called in a strained whisper. He rushed back into the fog. If anything had happened to her, after all this, he would never forgive himself. He continued running through the curtains of fog.

They collided before he’d taken ten paces.

“Oww!”
she said.

“Cathren. Damn! Where’d you go?” Donovan pulled her close and wrapped her in his arms. She pressed her cheek against his chest and breathed deeply.

“I lost sight of you,” she said, sniffling a little. “It happened so fast. Next thing I knew you were enveloped by the fog and I, I, I couldn’t tell which way you’d gone. So, so I picked a direction and just started walking.”
 

“Baby, why didn’t you call for me?” Donovan said. “I would have come right away.” He stroked her hair and then took her chin and gently pulled her face towards his.
 

“I-I should have, but I didn’t want to take the chance,” Cathren said. She sniffled and wiped her hand across her face. “I didn’t want those things to hear me, to give away our position.” She grinned sheepishly.

Donovan smiled and tried to be comforting, despite the undeniably crazy situation they were in. He let her go, but kept one hand in constant contact with her. “Let’s get to that building, whatever it is, and no matter what’s inside. Be safer than waiting out in this fog for something to leap out at us.”
 

“I’m right behind you.”
 

“Yeah,” Donovan said. “And please keep it that way.”
 

Their luck held and they made it to the building. Up close, they could see the paint was a faded blue, like winter sky. The siding was blistered, warped, and peeling. Most of the windows were broken. It looked like a guard house of some kind, or perhaps a small administration building. Too little to be a home, therefore, not the warden’s house, nor anyone else’s.

“Well, got the door open,” Cathren called softly from around the corner. “In we go.”
 

Donovan felt his way down the side of the building. Then he held the door open for Cathren, who was busy stuffing her mega-ring of keys into her back pocket. They stepped in together.
 

While it didn’t look big from the outside, it was somewhat of a labyrinth inside, with various hallways and passages and quite a few rooms. To add to the confusion, the fog had seeped into the building, filling the space with dense vapor up to the couple’s knees. The mist swirled ominously like wispy gray sharks in the dark house. There was no way to tell what was below the surface.

Cathren and Donovan surveyed the space, trying to get a sense of the layout. They stayed together; strength in numbers versus being divided, conquered, and consumed. Cathren reached over and held Donovan’s hand. They proceeded through the building. It was surprisingly similar to the cells in the prison. Room after identical room. Disappointingly, there was no kitchen, so their hunger increased a few notches. Donovan suffered from further hunger-induced weakness, and he could tell Cathren hurt, too.
 

They carefully made their way to the back of the house, into an area where there were no windows. It grew darker with each step, the fog swirling, the two of them faint from lack of food. If a zombie jumped out at them, Donovan and Cathren would most likely simply drop to the ground, defeated by their own starvation than by a zombie.
 

“Let’s get out of here,” Donovan whispered to Cathren. “Not such a good plan, after all.”

“Donovan, I have an awful feeling,” Cathren said, a worried expression on her face.
 

They turned to leave. That’s when they heard a thump at the front of the house.

“Did you hear that?” Cathren whispered, the hand on Donovan’s bicep trembling.

“Shit, yeah. Don’t move.”
 

They stood in the dark fog that swirled around them like ghosts and heard another thud from by the front door. Something got kicked and clanged across the floor at the front of the house. Then the door creaked closed.

“They’re here,” Donovan mouthed. Cathren squeezed his arm tighter, her whole body starting to shake. They had no weapons, no plan. And they’d managed to get themselves into the only area of the house with no windows and no options for exit. They backed into the corner together.

“Kneel down, into the fog,” he whispered to Cathren. They both squatted together, inexplicably and reflexively taking a deep breath of air before they did so, forgetting that they could breathe under the fog.

Then they waited.

The sound of footsteps heading their way increased in volume, but not in speed. Whoever, no, whatever it was, was having almost as much trouble navigating the fog and the dark as they had. Donovan could hear its feet shuffling along the corridor toward them, as if they had left breadcrumbs to lead it directly to their hiding place.

Donovan shook from hunger, and now from fear as well. It was one thing to fight these creatures in the open, with his full strength, quite another to be a hundred percent defenseless. Donovan was not too proud to admit to himself that it’d been cool to have an ace in the hole with Cathren. Now, however, that option was out. They were goners.

A shadowy figure entered the room and stopped just at the door. Donovan couldn’t make it out through the fog, and hoped that it, too, couldn’t detect the two of them crouched in their fog-shrouded dark corner.

Then, the raspy breath of the creature filled the room as thickly as the fog.

“What are you doing here?” a man’s voice called out. A reasonable-sounding, living, human voice at that.

Cathren and Donovan both chose to say nothing for the time being, hoping that the fog still hid them, and perhaps the man behind the voice was just calling out, a shot in the dark. Neither assumption was valid, however.

“You two. Crouched down there in the corner. I said, what are you doing here?”
 

“You can see us?” Donovan said, regretting this as soon as the words left his mouth. Their existence and position now both verified.

“Of course. I am wearing army surplus night vision glasses.”
 

“What?” Donovan said. He stood up, dragging Cathren to her feet along with him, as if they were handcuffed together.

Before them stood a man whose shaved head was tattooed with a coyote on one side and wolf tracks on the other. When he removed the night vision goggles, the moon eclipsed the middle of his forehead. He had a gold hoop piercing one ear and a feather looped in the other. His torso ended in the fog, where his legs disappeared, making him appear to be floating on the smoke from a magic lantern.

“Who, who are you?” Donovan said.
 

“I am in charge here, that’s who. This is my island, our island.”
 

“How did you find us?”
 

“You left a visible broken trail through the fog,” the man said. “I heard you come in here. I could tell you were humans, not zombies. I came to get you, to find out why you came here. And to tell you that you must leave, immediately.”
 

“Well, believe me, we don’t want to be here,” Cathren said, talking rapidly and trying to catch her breath. “You see, we washed ashore. We hoped to find a place to wait out this whole shit storm. We’d hoped this island would be free of the undead, and become our new home. But last night, we learned that was not the case. And then we heard these noises and so—”
 

“In reality, you are quite safe,” the man said, cutting off her nervous talking. “Despite the troubles here.”
 

“What do you mean?” Cathren and Donovan said in unison.

“Come,” he said. “Follow me and I shall explain.”
 

My name is John Pallaton. My wife is Nina Amitola. With our children, our families, and our friends, we claim this island as our own. The island is the remaining outpost of the United Indians of All Tribes,” Pallaton said. “We have been here since before the troubles began. Unlike you, we did not arrive seeking refuge. Two hundred and twenty-seven of us have come out to Alcatraz in small groups over the past year.”
 

Donovan and Cathren simply nodded, not knowing what else to do. Pallaton went on.

“My ancestors were here before the white man, before Santa Ana and his armies. It was ours from the beginning, from before the beginning.”

Cathren was uncomfortable; she smiled but said nothing. Donovan followed suit.

“We have been trying to restore the island—the homes, the land,” Pallaton continued. “The prison, however, we have not touched. A terrible place. A place of pain. We wish we could burn the entire structure to the ground, to ashes. As you might expect, though, stone, cement, iron, and steel do not surrender so easily to the flame.”
 

“No,” Donovan said, nodding in a noncommittal way.

“Anyway,” Pallaton continued, “when we got here, we found, as you’d suspect, no game to hunt. Plenty of rats and other vermin, but we did not then, nor do we now, consider them suitable for eating. Such issues were not a concern for us, however.”

“Why not?” Cathren said, hoping to seem engaged.

“The stores here were surprisingly packed,” Pallaton went on. “The warehouse, on the other side of the building we’re passing right now, overflowed with goods.”

“But hadn’t the food gone bad?” Cathren asked.
 

Donovan put his arm around her.

“Yes, a good portion had, in fact, done so. The rest, however, had been stored in colorful cans and containers or in piles of pinkish-purple pressure-packed plastic packages. For example, SPAM,” Pallaton said.
 

Donovan and Cathren stayed silent as they walked across the island and through the fog with John Pallaton.
 

“Canned bread. Dehydrated eggs. Powdered milk,” he continued. He talked without a pause while pointing out the infamous landmarks of the island. “All quite edible, despite their date stamps. Of course, for fresh food, the bay provides fish and crab. Alcatraz itself furnishes us with a significant amount of bird eggs. To be honest, though, these days something seems to have gone wrong with nature’s abundance.”