The Awakened (9 page)

IT HAD BEEN THREE DAYS
since the zombies had appeared. We had no phone service, no internet, and I hadn’t heard from my dad. The television didn’t even work. Ash and I had scrounged up an old radio of my dad’s and some batteries and tuned it to find a local radio station, but there was nothing there at all. We were living in complete silence and complete darkness. There was no power. We ate as much as we could from the freezer, old pints of ice cream, frozen vegetables over the stove, to keep it from going bad.

We didn’t talk much. Ash showed signs of wanting to talk had no desire to rehash anything that had happened. Instead, we just tiptoed around each other, trying to read books and magazines by the light peeking in through the curtains or by the flashlights at night.

I spent a lot of time in the shower. It was the one place in the house where Ash couldn’t go. It was the only thing in the entire apartment that worked. I turned the knob, and water came out. I stood under the steaming hot water, trying so hard not to think about anything, except getting clean.

Every time we looked out the window, it looked like more and more zombies had shown up; more of them were wandering the streets. They were always covered in blood, and sometimes they even had limbs hanging from their mouths, like a snack they were saving for later. It was revolting, especially when a fight would break out over the smallest bit of flesh. They all had raspy breaths. It sounded exactly like every worse nightmare I’d ever had. Sometimes, in the middle of the night (or maybe the day, it was so hard to keep track), you could hear them as they made their way down the street.

The radio silence, the calm that seemed to have taken over the city, was unnerving. I was used to the sounds of the subway, cars honking at the kids playing soccer in the streets.

That’s why, when the sound of gunfire reached my ear, I completely toppled out of my bed and landed on the hardwood floor with a crash. I lifted my head, and heard it again, the gunfire, and the sound of cars screeching by.

“Ash,” I called loudly and uncertainly. “Ash!”

I heard a loud crash downstairs that reverberated through the house; I turned on my heel and raced downstairs.

“Zoey!”

“Dad!” I cried, flying into his arms. He was an absolute wreck; his shirt was torn, and his jeans were dirty and covered in blood. There was a hefty gash across his forehead, and a nasty bruise forming right on his jawline. He caught me up, just like when I was a little girl. “Dad, you’re hurt.”

“I’m fine,” he said, hastily wiping at the gash on his forehead, smearing blood into his hair. “It’s not bad. Where’s Ash?”

“Here, I’m right here,” Ash said, coming out of the kitchen still armed with the fireplace poker. “What’s going on?”

I could hear sirens in the distance, mixed in with the occasional scream. The sounds of fallen footsteps as people ran past our brownstone reached my ears, and I could hear the rattling breaths of the zombies, just as Madison’s had been. I wanted to cover my ears, to shut it all out. Instead, I grabbed the gun and retrieved the holster from the case that I had left open in the coat closet.

“They’re all over the city,” my dad explained, as he reloaded his own gun and slid it into its holster. He passed me a box of ammunition without meeting my eyes. I knew we were both thinking that this was never the purpose of my gun lessons. “We weren’t sure what they were until people started reporting their dead family members alive, and that’s when you told me about Madison.” He took another gun out of the waistband of his jeans, loaded it and held it out to Ash.

Ash balked. “I don’t…I don’t know how to use one.”

“Take it, kid,” Dad said, his voice grave. “You just gotta aim.”

He took it, staring at it for a moment before his grip tightened on it. He took the holster my dad was holding and strapped it around his hips. “Well, I do play a lot of Call of Duty.”

I threw him an exasperated look but turned back to Dad. “So what’s going on? Why do you look so beat up?”

“They attacked the station. They’ve been attacking all of them, all the major cities: here, Los Angeles, Boston, Chicago…at least eight or nine cities.” He reached into the closet, where the safe was and pulled out his extra gun case, the one I didn’t even have access to. He yanked out three more guns and his rifle and packed them in his old gym bag. “We didn’t know what to think. What do you think? But then they started attacking everyone, ripping them to shreds. They kept wailing on and on about being hungry.”

“That’s exactly what Madison was doing,” I said, strapping my own holster around my hips.

“Where is she?” he asked, looking up from his task and meeting my eyes. I looked down, unable to answer. “Oh, okay, all right. Well, we need to get away. We need to go. The Awakened are everywhere.”

“What? Awakened?”

Dad sighed. “That’s what they’re calling them, the…eople. They’re not zombies, and no one feels right calling them zombies. Someone on TV said Awakened, and that’s what they are now. It doesn’t matter right now. Let’s go.”

“Dad, they’re everywhere,” I said aghast. “We’ll never get past them. They’re fast…”

“I know they’re fast, okay? And they’re incredibly smart. This isn’t like anything we ever expected. They’re aware and able to communicate, and they look exactly like the people we know, except they’re not. And they only seem to want one thing: us. So we need to go. Now.”

I looked out the window and saw that there were even more zombies outside. There was a nondescript black SUV parked haphazardly on the sidewalk, and I immediately recognized it as a vehicle my dad sometimes used from the station. “There are just too many for the two of us, Dad.”

“The three of us,” he corrected.

I turned away from the window to look at him. “Excuse me?”

“The three of us: you, me and Ash,” he said, grabbing a coat from the closet and shoving his arms in. “You’ve got five minutes to pack; we need to go.”

“But Dad…” I protested, avoiding all eye contact with Ash, who was standing frozen in place.

He wheeled on me, anger and worry and panic on his face. “Seriously, Zoey Elizabeth? We need to go, and we need to go now. Ash is coming with us. We’re not just going to leave him here.”

I opened my mouth and closed it a few times.

Dad stopped what he was doing for a moment and ran his shaking hands through his hair, taking a deep breath and letting it out slowly. “They’re bombing New York, and the surrounding areas.”

It took a moment for this to sink in. “What do you mean?”

“Just go upstairs and pack, now,” he said, firmly. “We don’t have much time.” He looked at Ash. “I’m sorry, but we don’t have time for you to go home and grab stuff.”

I raced back upstairs, yanking my duffel bag from underneath my bed and throwing it on top of the covers. It was my travel bag, the one I always used when I was forced out to Nebraska to visit my mom, every other Christmas and for half of Spring Break. It already had several pairs of socks and underwear tucked inside and toiletries like a toothbrush, deodorant and shampoo.

I took the gun holster off (why had I strapped it on over my pajamas?) and threw the pajamas I was wearing in my bag. I slipped on a pair of slim black jeans and a tight black shirt. I crawled into my closet briefly and yanked on my sturdy black boots. I caught my reflection in the mirror for a moment and noted how I looked like a heroine from a Resident Evil video game or something. I looked like I was trying way too hard, but what else did you wear when you were running away from zombies?

I yanked my hair back into its usual ponytail and strapped the holster back around my waist. I proceeded to grab as many clothes as I could find and shoved them in the bag. I looked around my room, wondering what I should grab. Eighteen years I had lived in this room, eighteen years of memories and accumulating a ton of stuff, and I had no idea what to bring with me.

I pulled a picture of my dad, Madison and I at the Mets game off my mirror. It seemed so small, like it was nothing compared to so many other things in this room. Should I grab the medals I got from playing soccer as a kid or the Honor Society certificates? Should I grab the diary I kept all through my preteen years, filled with a ton of hate words about Ash, and my middle school crush, and eventual boyfriend, Joel?

“Zoey! Let’s go!”

I shook my head, dismissing memories and settled on the photo, my extremely worn and loved copy of Marion Zimmer Bradley’s
The Mists of Avalon,
my Mets hat and, superficially, my iPod. I slung the bag over my shoulder and ran down the stairs. “Okay, let’s go.” I turned to Bandit. “Let’s go, Bandit.”

“Zoey, I don’t think…” my dad said, looking stricken.

I looked back and forth between him and Ash, and I started to feel panicked. “No. No, you’re not thinking. You can’t be thinking…”

“It doesn’t make sense to bring him,” Dad said, softly. “I can’t worry about Bandit. I need to worry about you, and Ash.”

My fingers were lost in the shaggy fur of Bandit’s head. “I can’t…” my voice was caught on a sob. “I can’t leave him, Dad. He won’t understand. I can’t just…”

Bandit could sense the tension in the room and barked softly, pacing in place. He was only six years old and still acted like an overgrown pup sometimes. I looked appealingly at Ash and Dad, but I knew it was a lost cause. My dad’s face was full of defeat and sorrow, and Ash avoided my eyes completely.

I fell to my knees in front of Bandit and pulled him into my arms, burying my face into his warm, smelly fur. “I’m so sorry,” I whispered to him. “I’m so sorry, Bandit. I love you so much.”

I pulled back, leaving a damp spot on his fur. He was looking up at me, confused, and licked the tears from my face. I led him to the basement and shut the door. I couldn’t bear to look at him as we abandoned him. I couldn’t do it.

“Let’s go,” I said, sharply, refusing to look at either of them.

My dad was staring out the window. “There’s a group of them about a block up. If we move swiftly and quietly, we can probably make it to the car before they notice.”

“Brilliant,” I said. I looked over at Ash, who was hoisting a backpack over his shoulder. He was pale, and he looked terrible. His hair was hanging in his face, and there was a slight tremble in the grip that he had on his own handgun. “Are we going?”

My dad looked around the brownstone, and I knew he was thinking similar things that I had been thinking upstairs. Like me, my dad had grown up in this house as a child, had lived in it his entire life. When my parents had gotten married so young and had no place to go, they moved into the basement and my grandparents had taken care of them. We had both taken our first steps here, had birthday parties and lived our lives here. I had my very first kiss on that porch step, had watched millions of Mets games and cooked too many dinners in that kitchen.

Bandit was whining behind the basement door; he always hated being locked up down there. My dad closed his eyes for a moment and then sighed. “Yeah. Let’s go.”

HE EASED THE FRONT DOOR
open slowly, pausing every time it made even the smallest sound. He checked outside, his gun held out in front of him, before he motioned for the two of us to follow him. I thought of the many times that I had tripped down these stupid steps and hoped to god that I would not do that now. There was a heavy stench in the air, of blood and rotting flesh and death, and I tried so hard to keep myself from throwing up.

We had nearly made it to the car when there was a crack. My dad and I looked behind us where Ash’s eyes and mouth were open wide, his foot on a stick that had cracked in half when he’d stepped on it. All three of us looked in the direction of the Awakened, whose scary black eyes were all focused on us.

“Shit,” my dad hissed. “Get in the car. Get in the car now!”

We dropped all pretenses of silence and sprinted to the car, flinging ourselves into the car. I had barely strapped myself in when my dad peeled out, taking out a few bodies that had thrown themselves in our path.

“They can’t slow us down.” Dad shouted at me as he sped down our street. “We only have two hours to be a safe distance away from the city.”

“Safe from what?”

“They’re nuking New York City and the surrounding areas. Brooklyn, Queens, Manhattan, all of it. They’re doing it to all the major cities,” he said, taking a swift left, throwing me into the window.

“What?” I shrieked and then clapped my hand over my mouth as the sound echoed through the car.

“They’re just giving up? It’s only been three days,” Ash shouted from the backseat.

“They figured it would be better to just neutralize the problem off the bat,” he explained, taking sharp turns and speeding to the exit out of the city. “They’re nuking the other major cities too, the ones I was mentioning before, any area that has a huge population with the virus.”

“Jesus,” I said, paralyzing fear ripping through my body. They were going to blow up my city, the city I had grown up in my entire life. I looked behind me at Ash, who looked as shocked as me. “How do you know?”

He slammed on his brakes when we came up to several other vehicles before taking another right to go around them. “It was an accident.” He didn’t say more than that.

“How much time do we have?” I said. I felt the frozen pizza that Ash and I had cooked over the stove churn in my stomach, as we screeched through an alley, barely fitting.

“Two hours. Hopefully we can get as far away from the city as possible, and then we can regroup and find some supplies. I have some stuff, since we were supposed to leave anyway, but not everything. And Ash needs clothes.” He glanced over at me as we went sailing out of the city. “And we need to stock up on ammunition, maybe grab a couple more guns.”

“They’re blowing up my city,” I whimpered, turning around in my seat. “And we left Bandit.” Tears filled up my eyes again, and my dad leaned over and squeezed my thigh briefly before returning to his tear down the highway.

There were cars everywhere, people everywhere, and there was a state of panic. The blue tone of the Awakened seemed to outnumber the regular, normal skin tones of people who weren’t sick. I felt helpless strapped in this car as we barreled through. We were getting out, but none of these people knew. There was already so much chaos.

“Dad, why can’t we tell anyone?” I said softly, pressing my hands over my eyes, shutting out the destruction, trying to ignore the raspy breaths and the screams. The air around me was filled with screams of pain and the screams of people calling out for help.

He shook his head, pained. “No, we can’t do that.”

“Dad!” I yelled. “What is wrong with you? All these people…they’re going to die! We can’t…we can’t just let them die.”

“Zoey…”

“No, don’t. Just don’t. We have to tell someone, anyone.” I recognized dimly that I was having a breakdown, only my third of the week, in front of Ash. Again. One day, one day in this crazy messed up world, I would be composed and carefree and
awesome
in front of Ash Matthews.

He slammed on the breaks, causing me to fly forward. “I’m sorry, okay? I know, I know.” His voice broke, and he looked over at me. I felt all of the fight go out of me. I had never seen my dad cry before. “I want to stop and save every single person back there, okay? I want to save all of the millions of people in Brooklyn and Manhattan and Queens, but I can’t. And I just want to get you and Ash out of this city and to safety because that’s the one thing I
can
do.”

The car was quiet for a moment. Cars were honking at us, turmoil of the city was still all around us but the silence in the car was deafening.

“Some people will get out, okay?” He looked away and started driving again. “People are getting out already, trying to get away from…everything. But we can’t save everyone.”

We drove the rest of the way out of the city in silence. Staring out the window, I wondered how on earth we got to this point.

We had been on the road for about an hour when it happened. We weren’t the only cars on the road, but no one had the same urgency that we did. They felt safe; they were outside of the city. But what was safety anymore? Was anyone actually safe anymore?

We were too far away to see anything, to hear anything, but when the clock flashed over, we knew. We continued to drive in silence before my dad pulled off to the side of the road and held me. I kept waiting for the tears to fall, but they wouldn’t. I just stared, stared at the woven patterns in the seat. I could see Ash through a crack in our entwined arms and saw his fist pressed firmly against his mouth, tears streaming down his face.

I don’t know how much time passed while we all mourned the loss of our city before my dad pulled away and put the keys back in the ignition. “We need to get supplies,” he said hoarsely, starting the car and driving again. It wasn’t long before he turned off the main highway. He pulled a map out of the glove compartment. “I think we should stay off the main roads. It might take us a little longer, but I just think it’s better.”

I nodded, afraid that, if I said a word, I would burst into tears and never stop.

“There will be less people out on the back roads,” Ash spoke up from the backseat. “Do we know how many zomb…Awakened are outside of the major cities?”

Dad shook his head. “They’ve only been awake for a few days. We have no idea how many there are or where they are. The major cities reported that they were in the street and attacking, like in Manhattan, but they could be anywhere. We just…we don’t know.” He pulled off the side of the road and drove through a thicket of trees. I glanced back at Ash as the car bumped over the uneven floor of forest, branches scratching at the side of the car.

“Dad, where are you going?”

“There’s a town up ahead, only a few miles; I want to run in there and get supplies. But I don’t want to put you in danger, and I don’t want to risk our only mode of transportation.” We were about a half-mile away from the road hidden enough that no one could see us. “You guys will stay here while I go ahead.”

“Yeah, that’s a terrible idea,” I said immediately. “I’m going with you.”

“Yeah, Mr. Valentine, I don’t think…” Ash started.

“Frank,” Dad interrupted. “Call me Frank. This is not the world to be bothering with misters.”

“Frank, right,” Ash said trying it out. “I just don’t understand what the plan is.”

He looked back and forth between us. “We’re going to Nebraska. Last I talked to Jennifer, Zoey’s mom, there was no virus there. Which hopefully means no Awakened either.”

“Nebraska,” I said, softly, feeling my shoulders sag. “With Mom, and Caspar.”

“Casper? Like the friendly ghost?” Ash asked, his eyebrows furrowed. I picked up an empty water bottle from the console and tossed it at him.

“No. My stepfather,” I answered, glancing at my dad, who usually developed a slight tick when Caspar’s name was mentioned. Not that I could blame him. “So that’s the plan?”

Dad unbuckled his seatbelt, and reached for the bag that he had stowed at my feet and pulled out two handguns. “Yeah, that’s the plan.” He met my eyes. “I’ll be gone a couple hours, max. Stay down; stay low. Don’t get out of the car for anything.”

“Dad, I just…”

“No, Zoey,” he said, firmly. “I’m going. We need to get to Nebraska. And don’t think I’m happy about this, Zoey. I’m not excited for it either. But she’s your mother, and we’re going to be safe.” He slammed the door behind him and started walking away, trudging through the forest.

“Yeah, we’ll be safe. Just you, me, Mom, the man who ruined my family and the boy who spends most of his days making my life miserable. No problem,” I muttered as he walked away.

“Z?”

I closed my eyes, briefly. It was the end of the world, or at least it felt like that, and yet I could still feel the pang of annoyance rip through me. There was something seriously wrong with me that I couldn’t keep a hold of my perspective. “What, Ash?”

“You should get in the backseat with me.”

I whirled around to face him. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

A small smirk appeared on his face. “That’s not what I meant. But I’m interested in seeing where your mind was going with that.” I stared at him for a moment not blinking, and he relented. “I just meant that it’s probably much safer here in the backseat, where there are tinted windows, and you’re not so obvious.”

I squirmed, trying to work through this surprising logic. “Fine,” I said, giving in. “But don’t touch me.” I climbed over the passenger seat, my gun firmly strapped around my waist, and flopped into the seat next to Ash.

There were at least fifteen minutes of silence before Ash spoke up. There was only so long he could stay still. I could already see his knees bouncing up and down, his fingers tapping on his legs. “So what’s the deal with your mom?”

“What do you mean?” I said, looking out the window. I was amazed at the quiet of the forest. You could hear the cars driving by; a very faint sound in the distance but there was no other movement. No animal sounds, nothing. It was very weird.

“You have fought tooth and nail NOT to go to Nebraska, even though it is honestly the safest place for us to be, and I just want to know why.” Ash shrugged, stretching his legs out in front of him and encroaching on what little space I had in front of me.

“Yeah, it’s not really your business, is it?” I said, kicking his legs out of my way. They didn’t budge an inch.

“Come on, Z. We’re stuck in this car, okay? We can’t go anywhere, and we can’t talk to anyone but each other. I don’t want to think about what just happened back home, and I know you don’t want to think about your dad out there alone,” Ash said. “I’m bored, and I’m going out of my mind. I need a distraction.”

I blew out a raspberry, content in the sound that it made echoing in the car. “Agh, all right, fine.” I turned to face him, flinging my outstretched legs over his lap. If he was going to take up this entire car, then so was I. “My parents separated when I was ten years old and were divorced by the time I was eleven.”

“Yeah, I remember that,” Ash said. “That’s not new information.”

“You asked me a question and I’m trying to answer it, okay? Can you maybe not interrupt me?” I said, throwing my hands up.

“Okay, okay, sorry,” he said, calmly, smiling a little.

“As I was saying,” I continued, giving him a pointed look. “My parents separated when I was ten. And I don’t know, they sat me down like they had watched some parenting videos that taught them how to break the news to their kid. It was all staged, nothing like my parents at all. I had kind of known for a while that things weren’t right. After my granddad died when I was about eight, my dad threw himself into work. He was gone all the time, and then my mom started being gone all the time.”

“But I didn’t notice. I was a kid so I just didn’t even see it. I was so wrapped up in my stupid books that I couldn’t look up for a moment to see that there was something wrong. So when they told me they had ‘grown apart’ and that they still ‘loved me very much no matter what,’ I just thought, I don’t know, I thought it was my fault.” I paused for a moment, swallowing hard.

“Zoey, it wasn’t your fault,” he said, scooting closer to me.

I glared at him and continued on. “Then my mom decides that she’s going to move back to Nebraska, back to the house that she grew up in. Her parents had died in a car accident when I was about four, and the house just sat there while she was here in New York. And then began the battle of ‘who gets Zoey.’”