Long Tale Press

1

I think about time. Before the apocalypse I was obsessed with the concepts of time-travel, and changing the past to affect the future. And the only difference between changing the past and the natural chain of events is what person you are: a person from your time or a person from the future. Because our universe is composed of a web of potentials and actual occurrences that affect other potentials and actual occurrences. I had eggs for breakfast, which means that I was filled and satisfied and unconcerned about food until lunch. But if I had a sugary cereal, I probably would have felt tired and droopy and fat all morning. If I didn’t have a chance to have breakfast, I might have not been able to focus on my math test due to my overwhelming hunger and failed the unit. Or, if I had yogurt, I probably threw up in first period, ruined my social life and missed the test completely. See? Webs. The concept of changing the past is simply going back and choosing a path on the web that the universe is not already familiar with, and all of these turns and intersections on these webs are based on the smallest inclinations that spark decisions. Of tiny, meaningless, unimportant people.

Which causes me to think about laws. Every law is defending a subject from a bad experience, has a purpose, and probably a story behind it. I’m saying there are reasons for nutrition labels, surveillance cameras, street signs and locked doors. There are reasons you don’t taste-test in a science lab. Often reasons you don’t care about because the human brain isn’t meant to care about or know everything all at once.

His name was Jeffery Rose. That first stupid, meaningless, unimportant person who had an inclination that turned into a decision that led to something he didn’t think would be all that tremendously terrible. But this is why we’ve accepted the human mind as fallible and unstable. Because we’re not computers. I don’t have the time to think about all the potentials that await my inclinations when I’m choosing my breakfast in the morning. I’m hungry. Jeffery Rose of course considered the consequences to his actions, but not long enough to think maybe him taking a small sample of his newly-manufactured corn would lead to the end of the world. He did something stupid. People do a hundred stupid things every day. Still, it’s hard not to hate him.

It’s not something I like to remember. It seems like a given, at a time like this, but the longer I’m around here the more I notice that a lot of people do waste their thoughts on it. The way I see it, or at least try to see it, is there’s nothing I can do now, and it only makes me feel helpless and nauseous. So, yeah. I try not to think about it. But it’s something that won’t leave your mind easily. Something I have to try to expel from my thoughts. Something I wake up thinking about. Something that wanders into my dreams and the quiet times when it’s my shift to watch. August 15th. It’s like it’s been years. A lifetime. But actually it’s what…two months? Two months and four days, but who the hell’s counting.

The Zombie Apocalypse always sounded funny to me. I never could write about zombies because they just seemed too silly. “You’re my friend, but if the zombies chase us I’m tripping you.” You can’t really take the living dead seriously when Fido and Shaun of the Dead used to be the most visited sources for Z information. This also reveals the fact that the rest of the world also took the concept of the undead as lightly as I did until the Infected began to pour out of some kind of test lab in Challis, Idaho, converting everyone they saw as they stumbled along.

We didn’t see it on TV in my house because we haven’t had TV in my house since I was in kindergarten. But we still read the news on the internet and the sightings were, yeah, unsettling. I also remember the first, real zombie that I actually saw on the news in the middle of July. Before my birthday. Like everything else that Washingtonians saw and heard about, yeah it was awful and tragic and disturbing, but it would never happen here. Nothing happened in Washington. Nothing ever did.

But ironically, we were close to the next area to be hit with the Infected, seeing as Idaho and the good evergreen state are neighbors. As we watched on the news it took six days to reach the borders of Idaho. A majority of them stopped in Tricities and eastern Washington because the irrigation was nice for the D131Y. But somebody knew that they’d begin to migrate west for the ocean and the wetness. But it was all theory. That’s how this thing started. The testing was a theory. The escape began as a theory. The name for these strange, undead Infected creatures began as a theory. And then stuck. But in this case, it was like the migration theory whispered and hummed and danced along the clouds that passed from the east to the west and became the wind that went into the ears of those impressively stupid things and they, by some miracle of their own, heard it. And thought it was a good idea.

The moment the migration moved again toward us, Dad bought us plane tickets to Hawaii. In early August electricity still happened and planes still worked and everybody wanted to be on an island that the zombies probably wouldn’t be strong enough to swim to. So yes it cost his entire life savings to put us on one, but he found that probably the best way to spend your life savings is the way that saves your life. And your family’s.

And the airlines were packed and pre-booked for days: all headed to the same place. Our flight would take place on August 17th. I’d had all my things packed. I’d been sleeping on a bare mattress for almost a week before it was time to go. We all had. I remember the way Mom would try to smile and say in a way that trademarks her as the only woman that could ever be my mom, “If I was gonna go anywhere during an apocalypse, it’d definitely be Hawaii.” It was funny, and kind of depressing the way that we, as a state were one of those that lived closest to Hawaii and we, as a family had never been. It was less funny, and more depressing the way that most people who lived in my area shared a hatred toward dull weather and the endless rain and the life-sucking gray clouds that took the color out of everything. Hawaii was a place of dreams. A place with pink flowers and sunny beaches and hot Samoans. With lobster dinners and cool lemonade and hula dancers. A place always unattainable, but easy to wish for. A place that only an apocalypse would drive my father into paying more money than we had for going there. In the mood for joking about unjokable situations I would grin at him and say, “I can live with being a beach bum. You won’t hear any complaints from me.”

But if you remember August 17th was two days after the world ended for me. Hawaii was so long ago. And there had always been some part of me, even in Beez (Before Zombies), that knew I would never see Hawaii with my own eyes. Not that it would have saved us anyway, because a few days later we learned that as soon as the factories were overtaken, the mass production began and the corn became worldwide.

But now Rylee is starting to trust me because she likes me and in the house we live in now, we can’t use words like apocalypse or zombie or mommy. Minus the infants she’s the youngest of Club Hoods and while I know because I hear myself say it every night that this is a learning time for everyone, this is what Rylee will base the rest of her life on. Whether or not she was okay when the world Unraveled. The Z-word will be the earliest of her memories, and I don’t want her to remember terror and fear and hopelessness, even though when I lay my head down after my shift every night those are the only feelings that consume me, like freaking clockwork. But whether I would have objected to it or not, Joshua and I are the appointed leaders of Club Hoods, and I know if we don’t pretend we can handle this, then no one will.

2

Those bleeding hearts out there reading this will have assumed after the last sentence that the final words of this dying girl might have just one last dose of teen romance for you, and they’re wrong. Not only does this piss me off because as you might have guessed Washington happens to be the Twilight capital of the world and all those who aren’t fans are puking up fangs and shitting out silver Volvos, but it also means that you’re a daydreaming asshole and things are a lot more simple than you want them to be. Joshua is my cousin. He moved into my neighborhood from Montana a couple years ago because they were expecting his dad to die and my aunt wanted to have a firmer support system for the hard times. Exhibit A: my mom. Almost tragically ironic, Uncle Garth lived all the way through the Beez. Depending your definition of life, he actually outlived most adults in the Hood. Claire shot him down a week later during her shift. Together we decided it would be best not to let Joshua in on it.

When his family first moved here, their first several houses fell through and they ended up staying with my family an unexpected and unpleasant extended period of time. In hindsight I suppose I helped make it as horrible as it was but in my defense, along with Leukemia, Garth suffered from a severe case of bipolar: bi-sickly-sweet-grandpa, bi-just-plain-old-high-class-grade-A-pain-in-the-ass. At the time, there were eight people in our four bedroom house. By comparison, we’re almost up to thirty and Joshua and I leap at any opportunity to gain another. Club Hoods, his house has three bedrooms.

Obviously we can and probably should soon relocate to a bigger, spacious place but for the first time in my life I actually have valid reason to be concerned about reputation. The Looters (who are more treacherous than are ever given credit for in any kind of apocalyptic fiction) have managed to take us seriously enough for the time being to keep Club Hoods in a bubble that they can avoid when they raid. It’s a very shallow, fragile, poppable bubble and it’s something that’s on my mind almost as much as the Infected. But I know it’s only a matter of time before the Looters either die out or move on and we can be a bit more liberal about moving from place to place.

I was thinking about the church. The church that Joshua and Claire and I used to go to in the Beez has a full court gym and a congregational hall, surrounded by circular hallway with about twenty classrooms, including a kitchen and a library. Not to mention a closet full of nursery toys, four pianos and an organ. Everybody knows we could use the space, but I’m still too uncomfortable with the thought of having so much more land to protect. Maybe the fact that we’re all squished in like this, stuffed into sleeping bags on the floor rubbing against people we used to not know is what makes Club Hoods work. A lot of people in a tight space makes it easier to keep them all alive. In the earlier days of the Aze (After Zombies), Joshua and I agreed on twenty before we expanded. Now we’ve agreed on at least fifty, but I have a feeling that bar will probably be raised again.

3

In the Beez, Serena Robinson lived in the lower parts of the Hoods so a lot of the time I saw her on my bus but often forgot to categorize as a legit Hoods girl. In those days Joshua and I used to stereotype her for the way her boobs fell out of her V-necks and the way she played tonsil hockey and advertised her trunk had more junk in it than her skull. But when Joshua found her, curled in the doghouse of her backyard, where the rest of her left arm was, I feel like that part of her had melted. And that part of me had melted too, I guess. In high school you’re allowed to have all those sects of jocks and sluts and geeks and thugs and the works but in a frickin’ apocalypse, the only two sects you got are human and other.

Anyway I’d mostly expected to put her in with the Big Kids (the colloquial name for the recovering addicts in Club Hoods which Joshua and I only refer to in private) but it turns out she was clean. That, or she preferred to deal with her withdrawals on her own. That was the way Serena had become. I wasn’t gonna be anal about it, as long as it worked. You had to keep a close eye on the younger kids but everyone else dealt with the Zapocalypse in their own way.

Serena is crying when I come to take over her shift. Lots of crying happens in Club Hoods that can’t be helped, despite Joshua’s and my best efforts. Still, I care about everyone in this place, notwithstanding whether or not they bug the crap out of me. It’s good to keep everyone in check.

“You okay?” I ask as I approach where she’s seated.

Hastily she slaps away her tears. The watch makes everyone reflect and remember more than they should: I’m no exception. “Yeah. M’okay.”

I watch her from. the corner of my eye as she subconsciously massages the wrapped stub of her left arm methodically, in slow circles. The AK-47 sits in her lap.

“You wanna talk about it?” I try again. Routinely. I’m more than accustomed to the decline she’s about to give me to the offer I always make, but it’s important for her to know that she still has people who care.

Serena rubs her eyes dry with her remaining hand, and gets up from my Aunt Denise’s old lawn chair. She passes the machine gun to me, and I accept it. “No I’m good.” She tries to smile. Serena’s always been pretty, no matter what she was wearing.

“Get some sleep,” I tell her.

She promises she will as she heads inside to fill one of the empty sleeping bags somewhere on the floor inside. I take her place as I settle in for the watch, armed with the AK-47, a flashlight and a bag of chips from the food storage. My portion of the watch is from midnight to three, and it overlooks the front yard. Below the porch is a rock garden with the dead things we never got around to clearing away. Beyond that is half lawn, half driveway. I always thought Aunt Denise’s driveway was ridiculously oversized. In the wall of trees that surround we’ve tucked two baby monitors that corresponded with the ones at each sentry’s feet, so we’ll never have to be surprised. We got the baby monitors from Trevor’s and Rylee’s house. We’re always stealing batteries from stores. Anywhere we can get them. Joshua and I don’t like to think about life after batteries.

I settle in and move the flashlight back and forth across the lawn, metrically. My eyes follow the light but my mind starts to drift away. Like a cloud that slides across the sky that can’t be helped.

August 15th.

When zombies are settled in and spend most of their days planting, their deteriorating bodies typically wear out after a good twelve hours. But, we’d later learn that during a migration they’re somehow driven by this wildly immortal force to continue through the nights. They travel in packs of fifty to a hundred, and hit in waves. They moved so fast and the internet had been cut on August 7th and I guess if we had any more forewarning or even if we’d been more imaginative and afraid my dad would have come up with a plan because he believes in plans but even though going to Hawaii was all so real, submitting to devising a Zombie Plan would be the final step to accepting the reality. And as much as a flawless hero my dad was, I don’t think he was ready for that.

I was even still sleeping in my own bed when we were all roused by the sound of our living room window being kicked through. By the time I got there they were already swarming around my dad. It was dark but I still remember the noises of his ripping flesh and the thick, heavy cracking of his bones as he was torn apart. A zombie will naturally try to convert you unless they’re either hungry, or you put up a fight. And my dad was not a coward. It became quickly confirmed by the way I saw they had no appetite for my mother. I heard her muffled, gurgling screams as they pushed the ear of corn down her throat. Her outcries didn’t go on for long.

I can’t let myself think about it. It’s late October now which means it rains almost every night. For once I’m grateful for it because it does well for washing out the smell of dead and rot. My flashlight slides across the grass and the drops of dew wink in the illumination. I sit amazed at how little control I have over my own memories.

As an aspiring fiction novelist I’d spent a lot of time thinking about the way I’d react to a traumatic situation. Scream. Cry. Lose control of myself. I didn’t expect my instincts to take over. I’d decided a long time before, that I’d run to the kitchen for the knife supply first things first, though I didn’t think I actually would be conscious by then. The Zs were too distracted with my parents to notice me. I like to think that’s what made it so their death wasn’t for nothing.

I remember the way I wanted to scream when I thought I saw the silhouette of my mom stand up on her own again after the Zs had pinned her to the ground. When I could smell the organs of my dad. The way my eyes closed and my mouth opened but it was like I’d inhaled a hairbrush or something I couldn’t breathe nothing was getting in or out and I hated this and I was afraid and I was angry and all I could do was crawl, with the knife clenched in my hand, to my brother’s room.

My brother Daniel can sleep through a train. He actually has. We visited relatives in Spokane when he was a toddler who lived, literally, across the road from a train track. It came once at dusk and once at dawn. He slept well into the afternoon. More recently his incorrectly set alarm clock went off for almost a full hour during which time every other member of the family was awoken by it except for him, who was, without exaggeration, using the alarm as a pillow.

Now granted he’s a growing boy and he’s supposed to sleep hard but let’s be honest with ourselves. At age twelve, would you get to sleep easily if you knew the zombie apocalypse was real and happening? I know despite the startling disposition of responsibility I’d received, I still have much to thank God for, foremost whatever drug He had Daniel on that caused him to sleep through my dad’s death and my mom’s rebirth.

Of everything else I try so damn hard not to remember the way he looked at me when I knelt by his bed and shook him awake. The way the lids to his early-morning-sleepy-eyes that were so familiar to me blinked laboriously. That nanosecond of oblivion when he didn’t know the situation. He didn’t know that his parents were gone and then not only the look but more appalling still the promptness in which this innocent, unknowing look disintegrated. And I didn’t even have to say a single thing and then suddenly, my brother Daniel was an orphan. I know he’s twelve. In the Beez I’d tell you that he reminded me of it every second of my life but in that moment I couldn’t say or do or think about anything beyond the fact that Daniel’s eyes made him look like he was a hundred years old.

I still couldn’t say anything, so I just mouthed. “Let’s go.”

The look on his face didn’t change as he took my hand and I helped him ease silently to the ground. We crawled to the back of the room which doubled as dad’s old office and we climbed up onto his desk. I didn’t think we’d have as many encounters if we went out the back instead of my window because everybody already knew that the Z’d up are bone stupid, and wouldn’t go for any kind of surrounding strategy.

Still, it was dark and I couldn’t see worth crap. Just because it’s summer in Washington doesn’t guarantee you’ll have any kind of decent weather and that night clouds obscured all sources of light. In the living room, the cluster was beginning to scatter through the rooms of our house, knocking over the remaining furniture, tearing away doors, upturning the place in search for new recruits.

I hurled the kitchen knife into the grass ten feet below. With a rich thud it fixed itself in the moist grassy earth, then we jumped.

Pangs of shock ricocheted through the nerves of our legs when we hit the ground, but by then the Zs had discovered our room and were ripping it apart. I wrenched the knife out of the grass that I had blessedly not landed on and pulled myself to my feet, helping up Daniel behind me.

“You okay?”

“Yeah.”

“We’ll have to go through backyards. Try not to make any noise.”

I don’t know why my first inclination was to go to my cousin’s house. Safe to say we weren’t kindred spirits; I only really saw him at church and on the bus. A condensed period of time together in a small space will do that to you. My friend Claire lived closer, but we didn’t stop at her house. I don’t know why.

Perhaps the fact that this strangely primal instinct to find the ones that had the same blood coursing through their veins as I did is the reason why so many of us in the Hoods are still alive.

Joshua’s house was half a block up from mine. Looking back, I recognize it as the first occurrence in my life of violence and life and death desperation. And it was nothing like what I used to write about. Daniel and I didn’t have shoes. We had to pull ourselves over fences and we fell often. I kept my fingers ferociously locked in between his and every time he lost his footing that terrible awareness dropped into the pit of my stomach and I thought what if. What if they were on us. What if that oversized, warm hand entwined in mine was dead.

And I live in Washington where the number of trees outweighed the number of people tenfold, so it’s not uncommon to have a forest for your backyard. The streetlights drifted further away as we took detour after detour around impossible thickets and my eyes never adjusted. Our feet were wet with blood by the time we crossed onto Joshua’s street and heard gunshots.

“Get on the ground,” I hissed to Daniel as I led us into a full-front slide to Joshua’s rocky driveway, like we were baseball players sliding into home.

“Don’t shoot!” I howled.

Joshua’s flood lights behind him made his hulking figure a mere silhouette while he pointed his MG-26 toward my brother and I and continued to shoot.

It had taken at least half an hour for the two of us to sprint there and yet beside me Daniel didn’t pant. His chest didn’t even move.

“Daniel,” I shook him.

“Yeah,” he replied softly from under the cover of his arms while Joshua’s bullets sprung gravel free all around us.

I got to my feet, angry now. “Joshua!” I howled. “Don’t shoot! It’s me!”

At the sound of a coherent voice, my cousin lowered his weapon and craned his neck forward, probably squinting. “Andy?”

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