These four were milling about in the middle of the road to her left. Far enough from the gate that they probably wouldn’t notice her slipping off in the opposite direction.
Closing the gate quietly behind her, she set off.
Yesterday, when she had run through the streets following Terry, they had reached the shop in about two minutes. Going back took a lot longer, however, Emma skulking in the cool shadows of the houses behind which the sun still climbed toward noon, often stopping and crouching behind the low stone walls of driveways, hiding from a zombie in the road until it drifted a safe distance away.
At one point, a battered woman who was alive but looked as sickly as one of the dead came down the road in Emma’s direction on the opposite side of the street. Her arms were covered in angry red scratches. One of the straps of her dress had been torn and the garment sagged lopsided on her body, her hair knotted and straggly. And there was a wound on her shoulder near the base of her neck that was almost certainly a bite.
The woman looked as though she would have hissed at Emma had she tried to cross the road and come near her. They passed one another in silence, the woman glowering and not taking her eyes off her until they were out of sight of each other.
Maybe Emma should have tried to find a weapon before coming out here; if a zombie started chasing her, she would have to run and hope she didn’t attract the attention of a whole group of them. She had visions of fumbling with her car keys, accidentally dropping them in the footwell as a pack of zombies jostled closer and closer, like a scene from a horror film.
In the end, she made it to her road without a throng of the undead on her heels.
But the undead weren’t her only problem.
Emma heard them before she saw them – voices disturbing the apocalyptic hush that had settled over the neighbourhood. Deep, male voices. At first she thought they sounded panicked. But as she neared the place where the voices were coming from, it dawned on her that what she was hearing was something closer to excitement than fear.
Nearing her home, Emma saw movement in her driveway and realised then that the people she could hear were trying to get into her car.
No – they were getting into her car. They had obviously just been inside the house and gotten hold of her keys because they were opening the doors and climbing in. Four men. The ignition came on.
Emma started to run towards her driveway when she saw this, but quickly stopped herself. They were already reversing out into the road and there wasn’t much she could do to stop them. And she didn’t know these men; it was the end of the world, they were stealing her car, and chances were they wouldn’t hold back from other crimes. Worse ones. Rape and murder.
Ducking behind an overgrown bush in the front garden of the nearest house, Emma watched her car speed away down the road with a growing feeling of unease.
It was a feeling that reminded her of when she was eleven years old, on a swimming trip at a local indoor pool – when she went up to the diving board because her friends were jumping off it and she wanted to prove she could do it too. But she wasn’t quite ready. And as she climbed the ladder, the jagged rubber grips digging into the water-softened soles of her feet, she began to think she had made a terrible decision. I’m going to jump wrong and hurt myself. I’ll go too far under the water and I won’t be able to swim back up. But it was too late to turn back.
None of those things actually happened. She just flopped unimpressively into the pool and went back to playing around on the floats.
But those moments of questioning her decision, of being aware of her own fragility and feeling like she was the only one who could see how vulnerable people really were, had stuck with her.
Emma’s car turned out of sight at the corner and she stared blankly in its direction for an unnecessary amount of time after it had disappeared.
Was she stupid? Was there any chance of her seeing her sister again when the world as she knew it and the rules that governed it were crumbling too fast for her to keep up with?
She was suddenly aware that her hand had travelled to her mouth while she was staring, and now she was unconsciously nibbling her thumbnail. An anxious tick. She never chewed her nails down, just teethed on them; they always had to be neatly trimmed. It was one of the many things she was religiously precise about.
Time to move, Emma, she ordered herself.
The front door was open, as she had left it when she ran to Terry’s aid yesterday. That was how the men had been able to walk in and snatch her car keys. Putting her self-berating thoughts to the back of mind, Emma went to the living room.
Her breath caught in her throat.
Immediately she noticed that her laptop was gone. Why they had taken it was anybody’s guess. Maybe they were opportunistic thieves who thought they might be able to sell it if the world ever got back to normal. She snapped her gaze around the room, searching for her phone, only seeing it as she stooped low and noticed the glimmer of broken glass on the carpet; it was on the floor, screen shattered.
Racing over to it, she picked the phone up and pressed the home button. The fractured screen lit up but showed nothing except a
