Lost World (8 page)

We’re running out of time.

Still Moira stands frozen. No matter how hard I push, I can’t get her attention. Liz squirms in my grasp, screaming and crying as she tries to get to her mom. I’m having a hard time hanging on to the child, so I try the only thing I can think to do. I slap Moira across the face so hard my palm stings from the impact. Finally, she stumbles back a few inches. When she looks at me though, her expression is so blank I feel like I’m staring into the eyes of a mannequin. It’s useless. The closest zombies are less than a foot away from me now, and Moira is like a boulder. I can’t make her move. I’m not even sure she knows what’s happening.

“I’m sorry.” Tears fill my eyes when I turn away from her and run toward the rest of our group, clutching a screaming Liz in my arms.

Liz cries for her mom, kicking her feet. She fights and squirms in my arms so hard that she manages to wiggle from my grasp, falling to the ground right in front of me. My feet catch on her small body, and the gun flies from my hand as I’m thrown forward. My face slams into the stone floor, and light bursts across my vision as the world goes out of focus. I fight against it, but the screams and gunshots fade…

“Vivian!”

Someone pulls on my arm, yanking me to my feet, but I can barely open my eyes. I blink and try to force my legs to move. Everything around me spins.

“Liz.” I reach for the child, but I can’t find her and Axl won’t stop pulling on my arm.

“Let’s go!” he calls, forcing me to move faster.

Screams rise up around me, and my brain slowly begins to focus. I blink when warm water rushes over my legs. Axl pulls me forward, deeper into the hot spring, not stopping until the water is past my waist.

“What are you doing?” I ask, forcing my brain to focus on what’s happening. Nothing makes sense. Why are we in the water? Where are the zombies? Where’s Liz?

“Got nowhere to go,” Axl says, sounding out of breath. “This is our only shot.”

That’s right. We’re trapped.

I turn toward dry land, and my heart almost stops. The campfire flickers across the chaos, illuminating the zombies. Dozens of them. There’s no way we can take them all, and with the mountain at our backs like this, we’re trapped. But they aren’t trying to get us, not yet. Why?

I focus on the scene and spot a few places where they’ve gathered into groups. Their hands are coated in a dark, shiny liquid that can only be one thing. They fight each other, trying to get closer to whatever they’re feasting on. No, not whatever. Whoever. My stomach lurches, and I have to look away. Moira I know about, but who else did we lose?

I turn from the scene and face the group behind me. My friends are huddled together in a mass at the center of the hot spring. Jake has his arms wrapped around Anne, and Max clings to Winston. Joshua and Lila and Al are here too, along with Sophia and Ava. My stomach drops. That’s everyone. No Liz, no Dylan, no Jessica.

I grab Axl’s arm, pulling his attention away from the massacre in front of us. “Jessica? Dylan?” I can’t even bring myself to ask about Liz because I know what the answer will be and the idea of failing yet another little girl makes me want to throw up.

Axl shakes his head, and the storm in his eyes rages so hard that it makes me tremble. “They got Dylan right off. Soon as they came outta the trees. They grabbed Jess when she went back to try an’ save him.”

Sobs shake my body as I clutch at my aching heart, trying to hold myself together. Then my gaze lands on Winston, and the crack in my chest spreads. In the moonlight, I can just make out the tears shimmering on his cheeks.

The suffering of my companions is so intense it feels like something pressing down on me. The children cry and Lila presses her face into Al’s chest, sniffling quietly. Sophia and Anne are silent in their crying, but their pain is etched so clearly on their faces that it makes my insides pulse agonizingly. I can’t even think about the suffering Winston is going through right now because it’s an ache too familiar for me to face.

“What do we do now?” I ask, looking back at Axl.

He shakes his head again, and I throw myself into his arms. There’s maybe twelve feet of water separating us from the zombies feasting on the beach. They’re preoccupied now, but soon they’ll realize we’re here. Then we’ll be in real trouble. We need to plan now before they notice us.

I pull back and look the group over. “How many guns do we have?”

Axl holds up a gun, and so do Al and Winston. That’s it, though. I lost the gun I took from Anne when Liz tripped me up. But I do still have my knife.

“Knives?” I ask hopefully.

“I have one,” Lila says in a shaky voice.

Al nods beside her, and so does Anne. Joshua, Winston, Axl, and I all have one. That’s something at least.

“We just have to outlast them, then,” I say, turning away from the shore.

I wade farther into the hot spring, heading to the other side. The water gets deeper the further out I go, and soon it’s higher than my hips and then up to my ribs, but I keep moving. Pushing through the steaming pool of water. It comes all the way up to my breasts before it starts to get shallower again. By the time I reach the other side, it’s only up to my knees. The kids will be able to stand here, and there will be more distance between us and the zombies. There’s no way anything would be able to get at us from this side. The hot spring ends at a rock wall.

“Here,” I call, motioning for the others to come further out. “Here! It’s shallower, and with the way they move it will be harder for them to get to us. We’ll stand more of a chance.”

The others wade toward me, and I do my best to block out the sound of the kids’ sobbing while I think. Hearing it makes my insides uneasy, and I can’t lose focus right now.

“What’re you thinkin’?” Axl asks, stopping next to me.

“We just need to take one out at a time.”

I scan the tree line in the distance, just barely illuminated by the campfire still burning. The light flickers over the mass of bodies, sending a shiver down my spine. So many. But they haven’t moved toward us yet, and as far as I can tell there’s no more movement in the forest.

I point toward the shore with a shaky hand. “No more zombies have come out of the trees, so this must be the whole horde. When they head this way, it will be staggered. We need to focus on the closest one, then move onto the next. Just one at a time,” I say again. “That’s it.”

“It could work.” Winston nods slowly, staring out over the mass of dead.

I can’t even imagine what he’s going through right now. His cheeks are still damp with tears, but he doesn’t wipe them away. He scans the feeding zombies with a determined expression on his face. We all know his daughter’s body is lying there, but he doesn’t allow it to affect his focus.

“So we just have to outlast them?” Joshua asks.

I nod, but Al shakes his head. “Assuming they don’t swim.”

Shit. I hadn’t even considered they might be able to swim to us. I was counting on them having to wade through the water. On it slowing them down. But they can’t possibly swim. Can they?

“Do they swim?” I ask, looking the group over like one of them will have the answer.

My eyes meet Al’s, and the kid shrugs. If anyone had a theory, he’d be the one, but he looks as clueless as everyone else. This is something we haven’t had to face yet. Who knew we ever would?

“They could fly for all we know,” I mutter as I turn back to face dry land. “We just have to see what happens.”

No one argues with me, and why would they? I’m making this up as I go, and it’s not like anyone else has any ideas. We lapse into tense silence as we wait to find out our fate. No matter what, we won’t go down without a fight. Not now, not ever.

Jake’s coughs draw the attention of the first zombie only a few minutes later. The creature stands and sniffs, then stumbles forward a few steps. It’s obvious when he catches sight of us, because he staggers toward the water while he grasps at the air. Like he’s trying to rip into us from twenty feet away.

“Here we go,” Axl mutters, moving forward.

The water swirls around me as everyone moves to get ready. The zombie steps into the hot spring, and a part of me hopes the warm water will somehow deter him. It doesn’t, of course. He lurches forward without hesitation, and I hold my breath as he gets deeper. The water goes higher, and he slows. It’s up to his waist, but he doesn’t try to swim. He just keeps wading toward us.

“I guess that answers that question,” Winston says.

The dead man moves slowly, but by the time he’s made it halfway to us, another zombie has followed him into the water. Then more come, but just like I thought, they’re spread out. With as slow as they’re moving, we should be able to take them out pretty easily. Of course, I don’t want to get my hopes up too much. There are a lot of bodies on dry land still eating, and if they all decide to move toward us at once we could be in trouble. It’s possible. Nothing else has gone our way since this whole disaster started.

The first zombie is six feet from us when Axl moves forward to meet him. I follow so I can back him up, but I doubt he’ll need it. This should be an easy kill. He slams the blade of his knife into the side of the dead man’s skull, and the body drops to the water. Bobbing on the surface like a buoy.

Axl shoves the body away, and it floats off to the side. Then he turns to face me. “It’s gonna work.”

He looks back at everyone else, and my heart thumps against my ribcage. It isn’t often that I see such uncertainty on Axl’s face. I can’t blame him, though. His brother is missing and we’ve suffered even more losses. Now we’re cornered. Stuck in an impossible situation unless we work together. Which, let’s face it, hasn’t been our strength the past few days. But we can do it. I know we can. We’re a family now, and families go through rough patches. That doesn’t mean they don’t love each other.

“We’re going to get through this.” Al wraps his good arm around Lila, and she turns her face into his chest like she’s trying to hide herself from the horrible reality in front of us.

The moans grow in intensity, and I turn back to face land. More are up, leaving the mangled pile of our former friends behind in favor of fresh meat. Us. There are six headed our way now. Chomping at the air with their rotten mouths. Sweat drips down the side of my face, and I wipe it away. Standing in the middle of the hot spring like this, I feel like we’re being cooked in a soup. Some kind of zombie delicacy.

More sweat beads on my forehead as I wade through the water to Axl’s side, ready to meet the next zombie that’s headed toward us. This one is old. So rotten it’s hard to tell if it was man or woman. Only the tattered remains of the shirt give her away. There are little blue flowers on it.

Axl takes her out with ease, slamming his knife into her skull, but less than thirty seconds later another is on top of us. I try to move forward, but Axl blocks me. He stabs the next zombie and it falls, but his blade gets stuck. Axl swears and struggles to free it as another dead man lurches toward him.

I cut through the water to face the zombie. He’s taller than I am. By a lot. His fingers curl when he reaches out to grab me, but I’m careful to stay just out of reach. Then I flip my knife over so it’s pointing up, and when I have a good shot, I strike. Driving the blade up and back as hard as I can, right through the bottom of the zombie’s chin and into his useless brain.

He splashes into the water just as Al lets out a yelp, and I turn just as he pulls his own knife out of the body floating in front of him. Lila is at his back, ready to fight if needed but staying out of the way for the moment.

At my side, Axl frees his knife just in time to drive it into the head of yet another monster. Winston does the same on his other side, and Joshua too. But the creatures keep coming. More and more of them, wading through water toward us in a mass of rot so thick it seems almost never ending.

“There are too many,” I call, backing away.

Axl doesn’t move from his position, and it makes my heart pound even harder. The children cry behind me and Lila screams when one of the bodies lurches forward, trying to get Al. The dead man’s fingers barely miss the teen. If it wasn’t for the water slowing them down, Al would be in trouble.

“Bastard,” Al spits out as he jabs his knife into the zombie’s left eye.

Axl takes out the next closest, but another one is right behind it. Practically on top of Axl.

“Axl, get back!” I yell, continuing my retreat.

He doesn’t even look my way, and his lips are pursed like he’s thinking something through. Hopefully, he comes up with some kind of magical plan that will get us out of this situation.

“Shit!” Al turns and heads toward the group, pulling himself through the water as fast as he can. Pushing Lila forward as he goes. “Lost my knife!”

We’re low on weapons and the bodies are still coming. All of them are in the water now, headed our way. I scan the group and count twenty-six still standing. It makes my stomach tense with dread. We aren’t going to make it. It’s impossible.

“Guns!” Axl yells, finally coming back to join the rest of us. “No point in tryin’ to be quiet now.”

He reaches my side as the horde of zombies closes in. All around us, dead bodies bob. The hot water seems to be cooking their rotten flesh, making the air thick with the stench of decay. Every breath I take feels more toxic than the last. My lungs burn, and it feels like I have a layer of rot forming on the inside of my mouth, coating my tongue. So thick and vile I can taste it.