Downstairs, she looks through the kitchen, pulling out cans of tuna, chicken, veggies and fruit, packing what fits into her backpack, making sure the cans are wrapped so they won’t make a sound if she has to run. She finds keys on a hook by the garage door and she eases her way inside the dark room less cautiously than she should have.
One of them has been waiting in this garage for who knows how long and the second her boot hits the concrete, it attacks. It slams her into the door, teeth snapping. “Hung, hung, hung!” it howls, trying to say hungry but unable to form the word with its rotting brain. An old one, she tells herself. She can kill it if she can just get her knife—
It smells so bad. Rotted flesh, decaying teeth, a pitted tongue that snakes out when it can’t quite reach her face to bite, to rend, to chew.
You’re going to die, going to die, going to die, chants her mind.
As the zombie presses tight against her, she wonders if it may be right.
5
Then
We ran through backyards, hiding whenever we heard them singing. They’d become them now in my head, things, creatures that chased us and threatened us and sang to us.
The singing was the worst. The singing made everything worse.
Rod’s breathing was ragged and loud. I kept biting my tongue to keep from telling him to shut the hell up. I’d do it, but that would make noise too and those things, whatever they were, were attracted to noise. They were also attracted to the scent of blood and Rod’s bite was a problem.
We pressed ourselves against the house and I crept forward, peering around the corner to see if the road was clear, if there was a car we could take, anything to make this shitty night less shitty.
A group of them surrounded a car, chanting at the terrified people inside. One of them was a child of about three, a little girl in a snowsuit with mittens hanging from her wrists. Part of her scalp hung from her head and dangled there just like her mittens as she slapped her hands on the car door, making the kids inside scream.
“Not safe,” I muttered, pushing Lana and Rod back, my trembling finger pressed tight to my lips. “We keep going behind the houses for now.”
Lana gripped my arm. “What did you see?”
I shook my head. “You don’t want to know. Really,” I said when she looked like she was going to push it. “It was bad.”
“All of this is bad,” she said and before I could stop her, she moved away toward the front. Her gasp was too loud in the black, awful night but either the monsters in the street didn’t care or didn’t hear.
With a silent curse, I dragged her toward the back, my grip too hard, my anger white-hot. “Do you want to die?” I whispered, my face in hers. “Because that’s how you fucking die.”
“Back off, Deena. I’m sorry I made a sound but you don’t get to treat me like I’m an idiot.”
Rod, leaning against the house, his wrist held gently against his chest, said, “Girls, now’s not the time.”
“Not girls, Rod. But you’re right.” I never thought I’d say those particular words to Rod, but I supposed anything was possible when the dead roamed the earth, eh? To Lana, I said, “I’m sorry. I’m just terrified out of my gourd that something bad is going to happen to you, that they’ll attack and I won’t be able to save you.” Even now, tucked away in the darkness I felt exposed, vulnerable in a way I’d never felt before. It was terrifying, like standing on the edge of a skyscraper with the wind blowing.
She put her hands on either side of my face, pulling me back from the precipice where she somehow knew I was standing. “We save each other. You hear me? I’m not your damsel in distress. It’s always been us against the world, not you between me and the world.”
She didn’t understand that I would always do whatever it took to protect her, that she was my heart and soul, and without her I wouldn’t want to live. But now wasn’t the time to argue that point. “Right, okay, yeah. I’m sorry.”
She didn’t answer, just kissed me hard. “Let’s get out of here. Come on.”
We had to weave our way in and out of fenced yards, around hedges, hiding when we heard them shuffling around, hooting, barking, laughing. On every zombie show or movie, the undead moaned. They didn’t sing, they didn’t call out, they didn’t act like anything but mindless eating machines. They were safe, I now realized, because they were stupid. Sure, if you got caught out by a mob or had one crawl out from under the table in a surprise ankle attack, you were screwed, but I’d always bet on the living to win out over the brainless, walking dead.
These things?
“Deena?”
“Coming,” I whispered.
We made it four streets before we ran into a large mob of them swarming a house lit up like a beacon. Cars lined the block bumper to bumper and toilet paper waved from tree branches. They were everywhere, walking drunkenly on the sidewalks, tripping off the curbs, crowded around bodies sprawled on the street. The house wasn’t enough to keep them all occupied, and we couldn’t risk being heard sneaking past. Even if we were as quiet as we could be, there still was the little matter of Rod’s wound.
We worked our way back only to run up against another mob between us and the way we’d come. We were running out of options and sooner rather than later we’d come up on one in the dark and end up dead.
They called to each other, we were discovering. If one found a victim, it would scream, alerting
