The End: Surviving the Apocalypse (26 page)

Treading water, Q reached down, hoping her fingers would not sink into an open mouth. Her hand brushed against hair. She twined her fingers through it and hauled.

Kate surfaced and gasped, perhaps remembering the taste of air from when she was alive. She didn’t need it now, did she? Q tipped the creature’s head back, stretching the throat like an offering, and raised her knife. No use cutting the throat. She aimed lower, deep into the woman’s torso.

She scraped bone, the hip instead of the soft flesh of spleen and guts. Q withdrew and tried again, higher. Her knife sank and she drew it up through the body. Kate sighed. Q kept her grip on the hair, holding the woman close and treading water, waiting for her to move again, to snarl, to bite, to claw but there was nothing more. Kate was dead.

Q threw the knife onto the gravel and then hauled herself out of the pit. Her left hand, still twined through Kate’s hair, was the only thing keeping the corpse afloat. She wanted to let go, let the body drift down to the dark places and never come back.

Instead, she grabbed Kate’s shoulders and heaved and grunted until they were both on firm ground. Then she searched the body, pawing at folds of sodden fabric and torn flesh until her fingers closed over the charger.

No. This wasn’t right either. Q couldn’t steal the charger and leave the body. What if Kate wasn’t dead? What if she was just knocked out? What if she came back in Q’s dreams, for the rest of her life?

This would end.

Q grabbed a limp arm and dragged the body out.

*

She grunted as she pulled the corpse onto the pile of branches. She was hot and hollow with the effort of gathering enough fuel.

She stood back, breathing hard. Would the corpse burn? Or would Zombie Kate stay whole, exhaling fumes, until the pile of fuel was spent and all that remained was its dead heart?

This was a body. It would burn. Most things did, with enough heat, Q knew. She’d been an experimental child.

She struck the flint into kindling and breathed on a spark, then stood back and smiled as dry logs devoured themselves. Q enjoyed fire.

Flames ate the things she’d stolen from the bush, leaves and seedpods and sticks and bark. She took a step back. Some fuel dissolved quietly into vapor, but some fought, igniting in shots and starts. The body lay at the center of the orange flame, a blue halo around it. Gas leaked from the skin.

The fire expanded. Q took two more steps back.

The body sizzled, its liquids pouring into the flames like the welcome barbecue at hell’s gate. Would it explode? Is that what happened when you lit a zombie? The skin was brown and wrinkled now, like poorly treated leather, and the corpse hunched over. Its head dropped between its hands, as if in prayer. Its knees pulled up beneath its body. It was shrinking, becoming more like a shaved monkey than something that was once human. Q took another step back.

Sweat poured from Q as juice poured from the corpse. Wood crackled in the flames. Blood pounded in her ears. The pressure in her head shifted as if she were diving deep under water. The greedy fire pulled the air from her lungs.

The body was almost black now with most of its flesh gone. It looked mummified. Slivers of ash floated up, lighter than air. Q watched them dip and fade. Kate was changing states, transforming from a solid to a gas in the least time possible, as if she couldn’t wait.

The fire threatened to swallow itself and leave Q in the dark. She picked up the sticks she hadn’t used and threw them in, not caring about her singed eyebrows and scorched skin. She wanted the flames to last. When she ran out of wood, she threw in handfuls of dried leaves from the ground and when she ran out of those, she tore soft green leaves from the trees and hurled them at the flames.

Despite the cauldron heat, the green leaves wouldn’t burn. Currents of air picked them up and took them away. They drifted and danced on the heat, immune to it. All fuel was not the same. That fire wanted only the dead.

Q thought about what Sheath had said, weeks ago. That there was no such thing as zombies, that this outbreak was like mad cow disease, a karmic virus people caught from their diet of tortured meat.

She thought about the swollen spleen Angela had removed, engorged as if overloaded or infected.

She thought about Mrs GLEEM, who’d been bitten but got better. A Seventh Day Adventist. They didn’t eat meat, did they?

Near-vegan Kate and all-vegan Rabbit had taken weeks to turn into zombies. Rabbit fought so long for a cure, but gave up when Kate turned and took away his hope. Carnivore Dave and Charmaine, the girl in Hannah’s class, were gone in minutes. Tinkabella and the Scarlet Terror took hours. Princess Starla took a day. It wasn’t about body weight or absorption. Dave was heaviest of them all and he had gone quickest. It didn’t matter where you were infected, because those bitten on the foot or finger went as fast as those bitten in belly or throat.

She thought about the undead corpse she found on the way back to the tunnel. It wasn’t injured, it had just stopped. Rotted away as if it had never been anything more than a carcass in the dust.

She thought about Zombie Dave and his double death. She’d killed him with a head shot, but he’d come back for seconds. And Princess Starla died twice too, once from wounds, but the second time from a spleen shot.

What kind of zombie died twice?

Q smelled burnt hair. She was surprised Kate’s corpse had any left to give and felt a moment of irritation. That woman was distracting her even now, when she was on the verge of working it out.

That was it. Pious Kate was the key. Almost vegan, she took a long time to turn, but she ate beef jerky when no one watched. It meant she would not recover.

This was an outbreak of mad cow zombie flu. It infected everyone bitten, but was worse for the meat-eaters, and it worked in stages. Its victims became living zombies, sick people who could be killed. When they died, they came back as the undead, and only a spleen shot would do, until decay took them. Even the undead were not eternal.

That meant some zombies weren’t dead yet. They were just very, very sick, like Rabbit. And some of them might get better.

Q shrieked. She’d set herself on fire! She slapped at the flames in her hair and leaped back from the scorching heat, then curled up in laughter.

Rabbit would be okay. All he needed was time.

She settled into the dirt at a safe distance to watch the fire lose its light and learned something else. Zombies don’t explode. They melt away like stale grief.

Q woke cold and full of joy.

Her back hurt from the damp ground she’d slept on. She stretched and wriggled, then crawled out of the bark shanty she’d built to honor Dave. She did star jumps and push-ups to force blood into her limbs and found she had pre-Z energy. It pulsed through her. She ran.

Running downhill was stupid and pointless – she might sprain an ankle or tread on a brown snake. But the sun rose each day and that was pointless, too. She ran.

Yesterday, trees snatched at her with bone-colored limbs. Today they were the guardians of her route, welcoming her, granting safe passage. The sun warmed dark places. She ran.

Q reached the cliff, glowing and breathless. She unslung her cordage. No fumbling, fear-soaked climb for her. This time she’d fly.

She whooped down the length of her rope and dropped the last few feet, landing like a cat, foot sure and smug. Angela needed to know what Q had found out, because Angela’s kids were vegan from birth. If they were bitten, they might get better. Q couldn’t wait to tell her and to charge up the phone she’d left at camp to tell Hannah. The world wasn’t over. The pandemic would end naturally, like all pandemics. It would burn itself out, leaving rotten corpses by the track and survivors everywhere else.

Moving in the same direction as the water was so much easier than walking against it had been yesterday. She went too fast to get cold, letting her momentum carry her even as her footing slid beneath her. She wasn’t worried about preserving herself. If anything happened, she’d heal. That’s what people did.

Q was back at camp a few hours after sunrise. She cupped her hands around her mouth and bellowed. There was no reply.

She leaped out of the water. She could see the bark shanty and the unlit campfire, but no Angela. Clouds smothered the sky.

Where had Angela gone? Why didn’t she answer?

Q’s swollen heart shriveled. Had Angela been attacked? Or had she left without knowing it wasn’t the end of the world after all? She checked the clearing, searching for a note or a sign of what happened. She yelled again, making herself louder than the stream and the swell of wind in the trees, louder than the white noise of living things. She must be too far away, or dead. Otherwise she’d respond.

Q walked toward the spot where she had left Rabbit. She wasn’t sure what she’d find but her stomach twisted at the options. Her feet dragged. Angela didn’t know that Rabbit was human and would get better. Perhaps, deciding Q would never return, she’d taken out her rage and cut him to pieces. Or, thinking of her children and the hopelessness of her situation, the slightly crazy woman had dropped the qualifier and flipped completely, letting Rabbit bite her. She could be grunting sweet nothings in his ear. Maybe she’d gone old school and shot him, then shot herself.

How many bodies would Q find? She should never have left Angela alone.

When Q reached the site, it was less horrific than she’d feared, but more sinister. There were no bite-sized Rabbit slices, no bloodless Rabbit full of holes. There was no Rabbit.

Q called again, yelling for them both. Her words crept away through the undergrowth.

She scanned the dirt for signs. The best scenario was that Rabbit broke free but did no harm, and Angela was searching for him. Would Q be able to track them down before they damaged themselves or one other? If Angela were bitten, would she get better? Was she vegan enough?

Q’s heart fell. There had been no escape. Shreds of cordage lay in the scuffed earth. Their ends were eventhey had been cut.

Angela set Rabbit free. Why would she do that?

So that she could hunt him down. Rabbit was a zombie now and they had killed her babies. It was no relief to know that her babies were zombies too; it made it worse.

Alone and devastated, Angela must have turned to blood sports for solace. Q would have empathized but for her choice of target.

“Damn hippies,” she said. “No natural outlet for aggression and what happens? They crack in the first month of a perfectly straightforward zombie apocalypse.”

There was a gunshot. Q ran toward it.

*

She found Rabbit first and could have kissed him, but didn’t, because she didn’t want her face eaten off. She hid behind a rough-barked tree instead.

He moved in that jointless shuffle that made Q think of arthritis and too much beer. His skin was gray and lifeless. It had been for weeks. How could she have been so mistaken? Everyone looks like death warmed up when they have the flu and this was very bad flu. How many people across the country had failed to find a pulse in their loved ones and killed them, not realizing that a heart can whisper as well as beat? Even experts get it wrong.

The virus slowed down the system and the spleen worked overtime to filter out the foreign stuff. Those exposed to toxic meat sickened fastest and died, their spleen overloaded, but those who had never been in contact got better. In the meantime, the metabolism dropped, the skin went cold, the movements slowed, and everybody tried to kill the patient.

Angela could probably explain it all in medical terms, if Q could only find her. Where was she?

The cannibal cravings were strange. Maybe Rabbit got that one right. You are what you eat, and the sick just wanted to feel human again. The ultimate comfort food.

Another shot fired from the northwest. Q pulled her eyes off Rabbit and scanned the dappled bush. There were too many dim shapes to find one that stood out, and Angela was probably lying down, motionless, like Q had shown her. Deadly and impossible to spot.

Angela was about to kill Q’s boyfriend. She’d shoot him with a song in her heart, not even realizing he could be killed, thinking that he was already dead.

Q stepped into the open. “Angela!” she said. “I’ve worked it out. Sheath was right. It's Mad Cow Zombie Flu. Rabbit’s alive, he’s just sick. Infected.”

There was another shot. Q flinched away from splintered wood. A hole appeared in a trunk a few feet away. Who was Angela shooting at?

“Stop!” Q said to the hostile bush. “You can’t shoot him! It’d be murder! It’d be wrong.”

“Like killing and eating people is wrong?”

Q twisted. The voice had come from her left but she couldn’t pinpoint it. Angela couldn’t be far, she was a terrible shot at long range. But how could Q fight her? Angela had a gun. Q had none. She’d left it at camp. Idiot! She had a knife, but the other woman was too far away to strike and knew enough to keep her distance. Q was helpless. The only thing she could do was talk.

She’d have to explain the situation so clearly that even Angela, enraged and desperate, accepted it. And Q couldn’t rely on the old classroom fallbacks of logic, clarity and the announcement that she knew all three pressure points responsible for bowel control – Angela was too far away for that to work. She was beyond bowel control.

Q had nothing in her favor but the truth. She’d have to call on all her powers of assistant teaching to save Rabbit. God help them both.

How would Hannah explain it to the Kindy Koalas?

“It was sick people doing awful things,” Q said. “I looked awful last time I had gastro and I did things I’d rather no one knew about. That’s all it is. Some die and become real zombies. Some get better. Rabbit’s recovering.”

If the older woman moved, she’d spot her. Q didn’t know if she could reach her fast enough but she could try, so she searched as she talked. “Sheath was right,” Q said. “It’s a virus. We don’t have to kill any more.”

The thud of a bullet in wood, ripping through a tree behind Rabbit. Angela had fired three shots, maybe more. The .22 had five. There was a chance Q could get to her while Angela reloaded, but only if she knew where the woman was.

“I found a dead one in the bush,” Q said. “It rotted away. Don’t you see? That’s why we haven’t seen any zombies down here. They’ve all died already, or recovered. There are no more to hunt us. Your kids might be better too. Don’t you want to see your kids?”

Angela stepped out into the open and, like Q’s favorite therapy inkblot, morphed from a tree into a nutjob holding a gun. Q smiled at her to show that all would be forgotten and they could be friends.

The other woman did not smile back. “I lost everyone,” Angela said. “Why shouldn’t you?” She took aim at Rabbit.

Finally, the man did something helpful. It wasn’t dignified, but it was human.

“Angela, stop! Use your eyes!” Q said.

Angela paused, finger on the trigger.

Q pointed. “Have you ever seen an evil undead corpse scratching its butt?”

Angela lowered the gun. Then she laughed so hard, she completely forgot to kill Q’s boyfriend.

Q walked across and took the weapon from her hands, then put a reassuring hand on Angela’s shoulder. “Now stop being a crazy person and come help me tie up my boyfriend before he eats someone else.”

*

Beepbeepbeep.

“Hannah! I’m sorry I took so long, I had to climb a mountain and go through a tunnel and fight a zombie and stop a rampaging mother—”

“Quiet!” Hannah’s voice was cold. “You lied to me, Q,” the girl said.

What had happened? Was Hannah the last one left? If so, what had she done to the others and was she too far gone to save? “I tried, I did what I could,” Q said.

“Hippies aren’t evil,” Hannah said in a small voice. “They’re the only ones getting better.”

Q put her hand across the mouthpiece so Hannah would not hear her nervous giggle. The girl was deadly serious, as well as plain deadly. “You’re right,” she said to her friend. “I’ll never lie to you again.”

“Liar. See you soon.”