In the Lone and Level Sands (53 page)

“Not that one,” she said.

“Why not? Is it not safe?”

“There’s a mess in there. No big deal or
anything, just… There are a few just a bit down the road, we should
try one of those ones. We have time.”

“Okay,” Derrick said. He smiled. The bad
memories faded along with the house as the two continued along the
road.

“Do you listen to music?” Zoe said.

“Yeah. Who doesn’t?”

“What do you listen to?”

Derrick stopped walking and pulled something
from his bag. “Here.” He tossed Zoe an MP3 player. “I could give
you a list, but it’s easier for you to find out yourself.”

Zoe turned the MP3 player on, set it to
shuffle, and pressed “play”. She kept the volume low so she could
still hear, and skipped through the songs to see what he had. She
saw Say Anything, La Dispute, Modest Mouse, Brand New.

“It’s pretty similar to the stuff I listen
to,” Zoe said.

“We can share it, then,” Derrick said. “If
you want.”

“Thanks.” Zoe skipped to the next song and
found a band she’d never heard of. The song was called “Pitch and
Resin” and the band was The Republic of Wolves. She listened for a
few seconds; the song was beautiful. “What’s this?” She turned the
screen toward Derrick, and he glanced at it.

“The Republic of Wolves. They’re one of my
favorites.”

“I like it,” Zoe said. The sky was getting
darker with every step, but to Zoe it seemed to fit the song. When
it was over, she turned the MP3 player off and put it in her
bag.

“There’s another house,” Derrick said.
Through the trees ahead was a random and sporadic presence of
white, chipped paint.

“Think it’s safe?”

“If it isn’t, we can make it safe.”

Zoe and Derrick approached the house,
climbed the steps, and knocked on the door. They didn’t hear any
movement, and the lights were all off. Derrick knocked again, but
there was no response.

“Be ready,” Derrick said. The two drew their
guns, and Derrick tried the knob. It was unlocked. The door opened,
and nothing inside moved. Zoe tried the light switch, and the
lights came on.

A zombie stood at the top of the stairs
ahead of them, facing away from the door, apparently apathetic to
the sounds coming from behind it.

“What do we do?” Zoe whispered.

“We’re going to have to take it out.”
Derrick raised his gun at the creature at the top of the
stairs.

“Wait,” Zoe said. Derrick looked at her.
“I’ve never fired a gun before, and this one—” She jerked her thumb
at the zombie. “—doesn’t appear too responsive. Maybe I should get
some practice in.”

“Good idea,” Derrick said.

Zoe lifted her gun toward the zombie, lined
the sight at the end of the barrel up with the thing’s head,
breathed, and pulled the trigger.

The shot rang through the house, and a
mirror hanging near the zombie exploded. The zombie turned around,
finally noticing the two.

“Shoot again!” Derrick said. Zoe fired two
more shots. The third shot went a bit to the right, but the second
shot hit the zombie square in the mouth. A spurt of red splattered
the wall behind it, and it fell forward and slid down the stairs,
coming to rest on the last few, crumpled up, still.

****

After they had wrapped and moved the body,
they checked the rest of the house for threats. It was empty and,
after locking the doors and windows, safe. It started to rain
shortly after their arrival.

They searched the house again, this time for
food, as both were running low. They packed their bags with the
least perishable things they could find. After that, they settled
in the living room for some rest.

They conversed for a while, talking about
things like music and the surrounding area. They spoke little of
life before the last few days. This kept the conversation brief,
and sometimes awkward.

“So, where are we headed?” Zoe said after a
particularly long and particularly awkward break in their
conversation.

“Sacramento,” Derrick replied.

“What’s in Sacramento?”

“My girlfriend.”

Zoe paused. For the first time, she
questioned staying with Derrick, thought about what effect it could
have on her life. But the moment passed. “We’re not going to walk
the whole way, are we?”

“Not if I can help it. Honestly, I’m hoping
whoever lived here left their car.”

“Well, we can look in the morning.”

Zoe and Derrick conversed a little more,
mostly about music. Eventually, Derrick went off to one of the
bedrooms for some sleep, leaving his MP3 player with Zoe. She
listened to music for a while, and then fell asleep.

****

Derrick woke Zoe up early in the morning.
She had been in the middle of a dream, but it faded from her life
before she could grab on to it, and by the time they had searched
the house for keys, gotten into the minivan stored in the garage,
and headed down I-88 at sixty miles per hour, it was long gone.

The sun was shining, and the afternoon was
just breaking. The buildings in the distance grew smaller and
smaller, giving way to open fields of dead, yellow grass, other
roads branching on and off from exits, and not much else. The sky
was blue.

“We won’t be able to follow this road too
long,” Zoe said. “This part is almost never busy, but once it opens
up a bit farther down, it’ll probably be blocked.”

“Like that?” Derrick said, pointing to the
road below as they hovered above on an overpass. The lanes on the
right were filled with cars, many wrecked, one on fire. There were
bodies and pieces of bodies everywhere, and a few zombies wandered
around. One of them spotted the flaming car and dove right in. The
lanes on the other side of the grassy median were almost completely
empty. There lay some wreckage from the cars across the way, and
the dirt streaks and broken edge guards suggested a few people had
from one side of the highway to the other. But within a few
seconds, the sight was fading in the rearview mirror, leaving only
the images burned into the passengers’ heads.

“Yeah,” Zoe said. “Like that.”

A few more miles went by. There was a nice
breeze, and for a while, they turned off the air conditioner and
opened the windows, letting the summer air flow through their hair.
The sky grew cloudy, but the clouds would not let go of their rain.
The ones that did were far in the distance, long behind them.

The afternoon was growing into evening when
Zoe saw the house.

It was standing in the field like an island
in a sea of grass. It looked dilapidated, uninhabitable, like
something that never should have been, but that fact made it
somehow more beautiful. There didn’t appear to be a legitimate way
of getting to it, just a small, unofficial-looking path of missing
grass branching off from a nearby exit.

“Hey, stop here,” Zoe said.

“Why?”

“That house. I want to check it out.”

“What for?” Derrick began to slow the car
and pull to the side of the road, toward the exit.

“If anyone else survived this, they probably
live there.”

“I’m not convinced anyone has lived there
this century,” Derrick said. He drove down the exit ramp and turned
onto the small path that led toward the house.

****

The paint was stripping, the wood was
creaking so loudly it could be heard from outside, and the house
was pock-marked with gaping holes. Derrick and Zoe could see into
it in some places, and completely through in a few others.

“I’m pretty sure nobody has been here in a
while,” Derrick said. He and Zoe were standing before the porch,
amid the long grass that danced with the breeze. Their car rested
several yards behind them.

“Guess I’ll knock,” Zoe said. She stepped
onto the first step. The wood was warped and uneven, but once she
had her footing, she made it to the next step, then up to the
porch.

Derrick followed. He stepped onto the first
step, and with a loud
crack!
his foot broke through the
wood. He stumbled a bit from the slight drop, but caught his
footing quickly.

“You all right?” Zoe asked.

“Yeah,” Derrick said. “Wood’s too soft to
even scrape.” He looked down into the hole his foot had created,
and instead of seeing his shoe, he saw a glistening puddle of
white. “What the hell?” He looked close and saw hundreds of little
white things moving around. “Ew, God! Termites!”

He jumped backward, shaking his leg off.
Specks of white were flung from his foot and onto the ground, where
most quickly scurried away. Zoe couldn’t help but giggle.

“They’re crawling up my leg!” He grabbed a
scrap of cloth from his pack and tied it around his upper thigh to
stop the critters from reaching the netherlands, then began to
shake his leg harder. Zoe broke into a full laugh, and Derrick
realized his little dance looked ridiculous. He looked up at Zoe
unappreciatively, let his leg drop, and collected himself.

“All done?” Zoe said.

“Yeah.” Derrick couldn’t shake the feeling
that something was still moving around in his pants, but he decided
he had made enough of a fool of himself, and whatever remained down
there would work its way out once it learned there wasn’t any wood.
Ignoring the puns that inevitably came with these thoughts, he
tried the stairs again, this time testing each step in great detail
before making his way up. It took him several minutes to make it up
four stairs and onto the porch, where Zoe waited, arms crossed.

“Glad you could make it. I thought maybe you
had set up camp and planned to make for the summit in the
morning.”

“I’d like to see you keep a cool head with
pants full of bugs,” Derrick said.

“I’ll bet you would.” Zoe laughed, then she
turned and knocked on the door.

They waited for a moment and heard nothing
but the wind whistling through the gaps in the house.

“Think it’s locked?” Derrick said.

“Don’t think it matters. Want to go in?”

“Well, it doesn’t seem too structurally
sound. It could be dangerous. On the other hand, I’ve always wanted
to kick a door down.”

Zoe rolled her eyes, stepped out of the way,
and made an “after you” gesture. Derrick readied himself. He
unruffled his clothing, took a deep breath, popped his neck, and
then lifted his leg up, shouted “Yaaah!” and kicked forward as hard
as he could.

The door gave easily, but not in the way
Derrick had wanted. His foot made a hole in it, which went up just
past his knee. Then the door (as well as much of the front face of
the house surrounding it) broke off and fell inward, leaving
Derrick nearly doing the splits, caught in a hunk of wood, and
dancing more than ever before.

Zoe laughed until she cried.

****

The house was even worse on the inside. Zoe
and Derrick were too afraid to step very far in, but they didn’t
need to. It was mostly empty, rotted, and what little furniture
remained was turning to mulch.

“So much for finding survivors,” Derrick
said.

“Maybe we should settle down here. Nobody
will ever come bother us.”

“At the rate this thing is going down, who
would need to?”

Zoe stepped onto a torn-up, moldy carpet in
the main room and looked around the house. She turned back to
Derrick. “Let’s burn it down.”

Derrick looked at her like she was insane.
“What the hell for?”

“Fun,” Zoe said.

“How is burning a house down ‘fun’?”

“How is it not?”

Derrick paused for a moment.

“Haven’t you ever wanted to just set your
house on fire?” Zoe said. “Just set fire to your old life,
everything in it, and just walk away? With nothing to go back to,
there won’t ever be anything to stop you from moving forward.”

“But we don’t live here,” Derrick said in a
somewhat solemn tone. “And I do have something to go back to.”

He looked at the floor. Zoe looked at
him.

“Then let’s make a promise,” she said. “The
world changed a few days ago. Let’s promise to never pretend it
didn’t change. And we can bring pieces of our past lives with us.
But only forward. And we’ll never reach too far back.”

“…Okay,” Derrick said. “I have some
matches.”

Zoe was surprised. She thought the idea of
burning the house down had long since departed. “We don’t really
have to do it. I was joking, mostly.”

Derrick reached into his pack. “If we’re
going to make a promise, we should seal it in a way we won’t ever
forget. So this house is the old world…” He pulled a match from a
box, struck it, and the sulfur ignited into a delicate, golden
flame. It flickered in the darkening house, and Zoe realized how
close to night it had gotten. Derrick closed the box and threw it
to her.

“And this fire is the future.” Zoe pulled a
match from the box, struck it, and smiled.

“Think it’ll actually burn up?” Derrick
asked. He smiled back.

“Well, I wouldn’t waste gasoline on it,” Zoe
said. “But if these tiny flames are all we see, we’ll just have to
try that much harder to never forget.”

Zoe joined Derrick by the hole in the front
of the house. They flicked their matches onto the carpet in the
center of the main room.

As they drove away, the sun before them was
dipping below the open highway, casting gold and orange and
blood-red across an endless sky, pouring it into the deep purple of
a growing sea of stars.

In the rearview mirror they could see the
house behind them, fading away into the same dark purple as it
roared in a massive, golden inferno, burning long into the
night.

51

After the Ferrington

Jordan promised Ashley he’d stop by her
house first. Her mother had been home, but Ashley hadn’t been able
to get a hold of her. Ashley sat in the passenger seat, nervously
tapping her foot on the floorboard.