Resurrection: A Zombie Novel by - (ready player one ebook .TXT) 📕

She had no idea how much time had passed since then and when all—this—happened.

She had driven down for the day from Seattle. Both she and Jenny moved to Washington State from South Carolina—Jenny because she got a job working for a congressman and Annie because she had broken up with her live-in boyfriend of two years and felt the need to start over. Jenny told Annie the Northwest was a fabulous place to live, and Annie figured that made it as good a place as any to reboot her life. Seattle was as far from South Carolina as a person could get in the United States without moving to Alaska or Hawaii, and since her sister was out there, she would not be alone.

She lived near the University of Washington campus just north of downtown Seattle. She clearly remembered hopping in her Saturn and driving down I-5 to Olympia. She and Jenny picked up some lattes at the Starbucks downtown near the state capitol building and drank them across the street on a park bench. It was a warm late-summer day. She remembered thinking the moderate dry heat of summer would soon be replaced with the cool musty air of October. There was no plague, nor talk of any plague.

The next thing she knew, she was waking up on the forest floor aching and dehydrated and covered in blood and gore. She reeked something awful and her mouth tasted like a rat had died in it. She got up, stumbled around for a few moments, and heard Hughes and Frank’s truck on the road just a few dozen yards away. And now she was in the truck heading to what Hughes said was their home base inside a grocery store.

A grocery store? They lived in a grocery store?

Where the hell had she been living these last couple of months?

“What’s the date today?” she said.

“Dunno,” Hughes said. “Must be early November by now, I guess.”

“It feels like a whole year has passed since this happened,” Frank said. “But I guess it has only been a couple of months.”

Early November. It was, what, early September when she was at her sister’s? So she was missing a solid two months of memory.

“How far are we from Olympia?” she said.

“You don’t know where we are?” Hughes said.

“It looks like the same general area,” she said, “but no, I don’t know where we are.”

“Olympia is fifteen miles north of here,” Hughes said. “Portland is an hour and a half to the south. At least it would be if the roads weren’t so bad. It would take a week to get there in these conditions. The freeway is impassable. We’d have to walk.”

She looked through the windshield in amazement. Both sides of the road were jammed with stopped cars. They spilled out of their lanes and onto the shoulder. Some of the doors were left open. What on earth had happened to everybody? Were all of them struck down by the virus? Even while out in their cars? Where did they go? Was there a refugee center somewhere? She swallowed hard, not sure she wanted to know the answer just yet.

“How does the virus spread?” she said.

“Bodily fluids,” Hughes said. “It’s not airborne, thank God. We wouldn’t be alive if it were. Don’t touch anything that’s dead. Don’t touch anything if it looked like something dead touched it. If you get blood or fluid of any kind on your hand, you scrub that bitch down. I can’t believe you’re not sick with all that blood on your shirt and on your face. I’d tell you to keep your fingers the hell out of your mouth, but if that virus was on you somewhere, you’d be infected by now. That’s for damn sure.”

“What are the first symptoms?” she said. She saw the five skeletons next to the Jeep they’d passed earlier.

“Sore throat,” Hughes said.

Annie had a sore throat.

“Coughing.”

But that was probably because she was dehydrated.

“A fever like you wouldn’t believe. Then coma. It only takes a couple of hours. Some people go down within minutes.”

She caught herself rubbing her throat and stopped. She didn’t want them to think she was getting sick.

“Water?” Hughes said. He’d noticed her rubbing her throat. She wasn’t surprised. Hughes didn’t look like the type of guy who let much get past him.

“Thanks,” she said as he reached under the seat and handed the bottle to her again.

There was something else Hughes wasn’t telling her. Frank had said the virus makes people aggressive. Like rabies? Does that happen before or after the coma? How could it happen after?

Pine needles and leaves covered the road ahead. The cars were covered too. Off to the right she saw the burned-out husk of what was once a Volkswagen Bug. They passed a boarded-up mom-and-pop gas station on the left side. She wondered what happened to mom and pop.

“How many people do you suppose have been killed?” she said.

Hughes and Frank looked at each other.

“Pretty much everybody,” Frank said and rubbed his mustache.

She sank in her seat. Pretty much everybody? How was that possible? Not even the Black Death killed pretty much everybody.

But somehow that felt right. It didn’t sound right, but it felt right.

She didn’t remember any of this, but the weird thing was that she almost remembered. She felt as if she were watching a movie that she had seen a long time ago as a kid. She had no idea what was going to happen next, but she sort of remembered things as they happened. She didn’t know what Hughes and Frank were going to say when she asked them a question, but everything they did say seemed right, like some part of her knew. Her mind was throwing up walls, leaving her stranded somewhere between amnesia and denial.

Frank swerved around a tight knot of cars in the road and had to drive most of the way to the tree line to get past them. Annie felt Hughes tense up as they neared the edge of the forest. He had that gun of his pointed out the window and was ready to pull the trigger. He looked like he wanted to pull the trigger.

Frank swerved back toward the asphalt after clearing the pileup. “Bogie at eleven o’clock. Hold onto something.”

Annie glanced left. A man came charging out of the trees on the other side of the road. He was covered in blood and screaming like he was terrified or enraged.

“Watch out!” Annie said. “There’s a—”

But Frank swerved into the man’s path and swiped him with the side of the Chevy. The impact sounded like someone threw a sack of potatoes at the driver’s-side door. The man bounced off the vehicle and flopped onto the shoulder. Frank kept going and checked the mirror.

“It’s down,” he said.

“You just hit that man!” Annie said. “You probably killed him. Did you do that on purpose?”

Silence in the truck.

“Annie,” Hughes said and shook his head. “He was one of the infected ones.”

“You thought I was infected.”

“He was covered in blood.”

“I’m covered in blood.”

“He was screaming. You heard him.”

“So you killed him?”

Frank and Hughes said nothing.

Something was wrong with her brain. What Frank did seemed wrong but felt right. Why? Her gut knew something her mind couldn’t access. Her short-term amnesia, her denial, her mind blockage—whatever it was—was tenuous. It wouldn’t last. Her memories were just barely below the threshold of consciousness.

She looked at the body in the rearview mirror. It did not appear to be moving or even twitching. The man was already covered in blood and gore before Frank hit him. Aside from the fact that he no longer moved, he looked no worse now than he did when he ran out of the trees.

“Can we stop for a second?” Annie said.

“What for?” Frank said.

“No,” Hughes said.

“I want to go back and get a closer look at that man,” she said.

“He wasn’t a man,” Hughes said. “Not anymore. He was one of those things.”

He wasn’t a thing.

“Infected or not,” Annie said, “he was a man.”

Hughes said nothing.

“We can’t stop here, Annie,” Frank said. “The truck’s noise attracts them. We’re damn lucky none of them followed us to the sporting-goods store. And anyway you don’t want to get too close to even the dead ones. Bodily fluids and all that.”

She needed to study that body, but she didn’t know why. Probably just her brain-lock trying to resolve itself. Her memory, her knowledge and understanding of the insanity all around her, was trying to punch its way out through whatever barrier had been put in place. Stopping to think and scrutinizing things might help, but Frank wouldn’t stop, and Hughes wouldn’t let him stop if he wanted to.

They rounded a few more corners and arrived at the outskirts of another town, the kind of outskirts that look exactly like outskirts everywhere in the country. Gas stations, fast-food joints, used-car lots, Jiffy Lubes. The place had been torn to pieces just like the last town they passed through, but here the streets were entirely empty of cars. Everyone had evacuated.

Trash, branches, leaves, debris and broken glass covered the streets, the sidewalks, and the parking lots. A pickup truck had smashed into an electrical pole. What looked like a used-car lot had exploded and burned to the ground. Dead bodies—bones, mostly—were strewn all over the place. The windows of a Burger King were covered with nailed-up boards blackened