Resurrection: A Zombie Novel by - (ready player one ebook .TXT) 📕
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Annie could only imagine how terrifying that must have been. No wonder Carol was such a disaster.
An army of those things. Pouring out of Olympia.
Where her sister Jenny lived.
“I ran down the middle of the road,” Carol said, “where it was a little less crowded. There were cars, but less people. That’s when I saw Hughes. He was on the other side. I ran over to him because he looked like the kind of man who might protect me. You know? And he did. I might have thought he was scary if I saw him at night out by myself, but a big guy like him was exactly what I needed right then. So I ran up to him and grabbed his arm like it was a saving banister. He let me. As if what I’d just done was the most natural thing in the world. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘We should get in one of these trucks and get down.’ So we did. We found an unlocked SUV with tinted windows and we got inside and locked the doors. He got on the floor in the back and I crouched down in the front.”
“Sounds like a good idea,” Annie said. “Lucky about those tinted windows, I guess.”
“It was a good idea. It’s the only reason I’m still alive. But that’s when it got really bad.”
Carol stopped talking. Annie wasn’t sure if she had paused or if she didn’t want to continue. Annie wasn’t going to ask. She didn’t want to push it. If Carol owned a restaurant in a prestigious part of Portland, she must normally be a competent and capable person, but now she was shattered. Like everyone else.
“I couldn’t see anything,” Carol said. “I didn’t dare sit up to look out the windows. It didn’t matter that they were tinted. Tinted windows aren’t like one-way glass, you know. You can sort of see through them. I didn’t want anyone or anything to see any movement inside. But mostly I didn’t want to see anything outside. And it’s probably a good thing I didn’t because if I could have seen what I was hearing, I wouldn’t have made it.”
Carol stopped talking again and Annie said nothing. Carol would either tell her the rest or she wouldn’t.
The silence felt a little bit awkward. Annie wanted to press Carol for more, but she didn’t. Finally, Carol finished her story unprompted.
“The screaming kept getting louder. Those things were screaming and so were the people. First people were screaming in terror and then were screaming in pain. They were being eaten alive, Annie. It was happening right outside the truck. They were being slammed against the side of it. There was this constant banging. The side window above my head cracked. I thought those things knew we were in there and were trying to bust their way in.”
Annie shuddered. She was not going to ask what she saw when she and Hughes finally climbed out of the truck. Surely Carol would never forget it, but also she might never want to discuss it. She reached toward Carol, found her hand, and clasped it.
They lay like that for a while, two new friends holding hands in the darkness. It felt good. Annie felt better than she had all day. She even forgot, for a moment, that she was being held hostage by Roland and Lane.
But Roland and Lane seemed like the least of her problems after hearing Carol’s terrible road story. She couldn’t get those images out of her mind.
Carol eventually let her hand go. Annie could hear her trying to get comfortable on the floor. It was impossible, but they both had to try.
Annie missed home so much that she ached. She wanted nothing more than to return to South Carolina even if it was a smoldering ruin. People breathe differently, more deeply, when they’re in the place where they come from. Annie breathed differently in South Carolina. She breathed differently in the whole American South, not just in South Carolina. The South was home. She didn’t like everything about it, but it was the place that raised her. It fit like a dress made just for her. The Northwest felt a little bit off, and a little bit foreign, even before all this happened. Not because there was anything objectively wrong with the Northwest, but because it wasn’t home.
Maybe things weren’t as bad in South Carolina. The virus came from Russia—that’s what Kyle told her, anyway—and it entered the United States in Seattle. So maybe the eastern part of America had more time to prepare. Maybe there were more survivors out there. The government might still even function. It was possible, right? She couldn’t really see how, but she had to believe it was possible.
Annie finally drifted off into a frightening dream world.
She ran down Fifth Avenue in downtown Seattle alongside hundreds of other people with the sound of screams, gunshots, explosions, and sirens behind her. Cars crashed into each other ahead of her. People jumped out of windows and onto the street. Some of them jumped from so high, they were instantly killed when they landed.
She woke up gasping and sweating and felt Carol’s reassuring hand on her shoulder.
“It’s okay,” Carol said. “You were just having a dream.”
When Annie finally fell back asleep, she fled a pack of the infected through a forest.
Parker was pissed. He felt a deep, abiding hatred for just about everybody. He could not fucking believe Kyle had Bobby’s gun in his hand out on the street and didn’t take Roland out. This whole thing would be over by now if he had.
But, no. Kyle couldn’t man up. Nor could Annie, who obviously had a silly girl’s crush on the dolt, inspire him in any way whatsoever to do what any fool should have known had to be done. And now Lane had him and the others locked in the cooler. Kyle couldn’t even do the decent thing and give Parker some space.
“At least they’re down one,” Kyle said.
“No thanks to you,” Parker said.
Kyle said nothing.
Parker couldn’t see a damn thing. He idly wondered what Hughes and Frank were whispering about, but he didn’t actually care. He pulled his army jacket tight against him so he wouldn’t freeze to death on the floor.
“We only need to take one more of them out,” Parker said. “Preferably Lane, but taking that other asshole out would have worked too. You could have done that today.”
“Yes,” Kyle said. “I could have shot Roland. And told every one of those things for miles in every direction right where we are. The water main brought a pack down on our heads when it exploded. There’s no telling how many more surged into the area. And besides, you don’t know what Lane would do if he found himself the last one standing. He might just start shooting.”
“Then shoot back.” Parker wanted to smack Kyle upside his head, but it was dark and he had only a vague idea where Kyle’s head even was.
“Listen,” Kyle said. “We’d be out on the streets with nothing if it wasn’t for me. I was the one who talked Lane into letting us stay here by offering to take everybody up to the islands.”
So what?
“Sure,” Parker said. “We’d be out there and disarmed. Instead we’re in here and disarmed and being held hostage. This is better how, exactly?”
“At least we’re safe from those things. None of them can get us in here.”
“You hope.”
“I do. You should try it sometime.”
He’d need to do something about Kyle. What, he had no idea. But he had to do something.
He should also try being less of an asshole. Things could only end badly between him and Kyle if they couldn’t learn to get along, but things weren’t going to end any better if Kyle couldn’t get all of his shit in one sock.
Parker was supremely annoyed with just about everyone, but he needed them to survive. He knew that, and he knew it consciously, but he still yearned for freedom from his dumb companions. He especially yearned to be free of Kyle. At the same time he feared dying violently and alone. Out there on his own? He’d be torn to pieces in the howling darkness for sure. He had to figure out a way to connect with these people. He had to.
Sometimes he felt twinges of envy for Kyle’s naiveté. How nice it must be to feel hope in this world, to believe all they had to do to build a new life is sail north. Did Kyle not understand that a person could die now from a toothache? A person could fucking well die from it. The infection could spread to the brain. Sure, they could raid pharmacies for antibiotics, but all the medicine in the world would expire eventually and most of the pharmacies had been looted already. Primitive man’s life expectancy was about thirty. Parker was pushing forty.
He huffed, lay on his back, willed himself to get tired, and failed. He could not switch his brain off. As usual when he could not switch his brain off, he thought about Holly.
He’d been married once. Met his future wife at
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