The Last of the Living (18 page)

              "I understand," Malcolm said with tears still streaming down his face.

              "I'm sorry about all of this," Amy said as she closed the door behind her. She quickly gathered her things and ran out to her Humvee and trailer. She noticed that the sun had already set and she didn't really want to travel at night, but she had little choice. She would just have to hope that the creatures wouldn't bother her. That was when she noticed that the lights that Malcolm had went to put on to keep the creatures away were not working and she saw sparks coming down from them.

              As she put keys to the handcuffs in the mailbox and got ready to drive away she wondered if it was really safe to leave them so unprotected like that. And that was when she immediately got her answer as she heard screaming. She jumped out of the Humvee with her gun drawn and ran towards the house. She ran through the open front door and could hear a loud screaming coming from within.

              "Oh please no," she said as she ran to the hallway where she saw one of the creatures charging towards her and she quickly fired a shot into its head, causing it to fall to the ground and dissolve. But she could still hear the screaming coming from Malcolm's bedroom.

              As soon as she opened the door she saw several creatures in there that were busy devouring Malcolm, Timothy and Suzy, chunks of their flesh hanging off the creatures' mouths. As soon as she entered they all turned around to look at her, so she ran out, slammed the bedroom door and slammed the front door behind her and bolted for her Humvee. She quickly turned on the high-intensity headlights just as the creatures began coming out and surrounding the house. She could see an entire horde beginning to approach, so she did the first thing that came to mind and put the pedal to the metal and began running them over.

              She was clocking close to 120 miles within a couple of minutes and quickly got out of range of the creatures as her eyes began filling with tears. "I killed them, I killed them!" was all she could keep repeating, but she didn't dare stop until the creatures were a mile or two away at minimum.

              Finally Amy stopped her Humvee and trailer in a field not far away. As she sat there in the driver's seat with the headlights illuminating everything for at least 100 feet, she put her head against the steering wheel and began to sob as the sound of the horn blared into the night.

Chapter 24

June 17, 2028 8:35 AM Midwestern time.

              Amy woke up in bed after having cried herself to sleep and having horrible nightmares about the creatures tearing Malcolm and his family limb from limb.

              "I killed them, I killed them all," Amy kept saying to herself as she sat in bed staring at the ceiling. She had just narrowly escaped death yet again, but once more some of the only people that she found in the entire world were the victims of her carelessness. "They didn't deserve to die," she said shaking her head. "Especially not the children."

              That was what bothered her the most. The children were completely innocent. The fact that she almost killed them just to save herself made her feel sick, and then she felt even sicker when she realized that even if she hadn't intended it she ultimately did get them killed.

              "I should have handcuffed Malcolm and left him there and driven off with the children, and then they would still be alive," she said as she stood up and vomited into the waste paper basket at the side of the bed.

              Although she felt bad about Malcolm dying he was clearly a fanatic and they would never be able to live together as equals or even harmoniously. He only saw her as a breeding cow and nothing more. She could understand his loneliness, but that didn't excuse his behavior.

              But the children, she didn't even know how she would take care of children in a world like this. Although their father might have been a fanatic, at least they had been relatively safe there with him ever since the bombardment occurred. They were living in a safe zone where the creatures didn't bother them all that much and they could have gone on living if she hadn't showed up and ruined everything. She didn't know how they would fare in the long term, but at least they would still be alive.

              Amy stood up and looked in the mirror. "Every single person you have met since coming back to the Earth you have ended up getting killed." She began thinking that maybe it was time she began giving up on her quest to try and find more survivors. She would only bring them more suffering and death, and they have all seen and been witness to plenty already.

              Then another thought occurred to her. "What if the creatures really are following me?" She didn't know anything about their ability to track people over distances like that, but it seems like the other people that she had encountered had been managing to live relatively safe from the creatures until she came around.

              "No, it couldn't be my fault," she said to herself as she shook her head, still looking in the mirror. They had all been menaced by the creatures to varying degrees, but it did still seem like the creatures showed up wherever she went, no matter how far she went, and in larger numbers. Was the fact that she had returned to the Earth some type of triggering event that caused all the creatures to begin swarming after her? Again she didn't know, and that was the thing that bothered her the most, she knew virtually nothing about these creatures or how they functioned aside from the few things she had observed about their behavior. But it did seem almost like they operated like a swarm of insects, so perhaps they had some type of a hive mind and could communicate across long distances. It was certainly not a comforting thought to contemplate, so she tried not to think about it any further for the moment.

              As she continued staring in the mirror she touched the fabric of her nightgown and began to get chills. "I am still wearing the nightgown, the nightgown of the wife of the man whose death I caused. Plus I look like a tart!"

              Amy took the nightgown off and threw it out of her trailer into the field, almost feeling tempted to burn it, and quickly got dressed in more practical clothing. The only one who had ever seen her in lingerie before Malcolm was her fiancé David. Just the thought that Malcolm was watching her when she was tied up like that and sleeping also made her feel dirty, and with some guilt, a little less sad about his death.

              After getting dressed in shorts and a shirt, taking her vital signs, and eating a small breakfast, she was beginning to feel better. But now she had to contemplate her next move. Houston had been a dead city, and her encounter with Malcolm didn't turn out very well, but she hadn't picked up any other signs that anyone else was out there. She was beginning to think she should just set up a home in a rural area and learn how to forage, hunt and farm and live out the rest of her days alone. But that would be giving up, and she wasn't ready to give up so soon when there was an entire world left to be explored. There had to be more survivors out there, simply had to be, and it couldn't always turn out badly.

              "I guess there is Los Angeles," she said as she remembered Maria and her family. "But I am wondering if it is even worth trying?" In all probability from what she has seen elsewhere, Maria's family almost certainly were dead or had been turned into the creatures, so she felt that going there would only confirm her worst suspicions and be dangerous besides.

              "But I owe it to Maria," she said as she stood up, fingered her cross and began looking at her GPS system. "Even if the probability is extremely slim, I have to find out for my own peace of mind just what became of Maria's family. And Los Angeles is a big city, so if there are any survivors a large city is more likely to have some. At any rate it is easier than going to Moscow and looking for Anatoly's family. Even if I found them I don't even really speak Russian."

              But Los Angeles was also more likely to have a very large number of the creatures, she thought to herself. She shook her head and paced about for a while as she typed Maria's family's address into the GPS. Traveling only by day she could probably be there in a day or two. She could wait as far outside of the city as possible and explore it just during the day and be out of there by nighttime. That was one plan and she thought that that she was going to do. "I'm going to Los Angeles," she said as she prepared for her journey, "come hell or high water."

Chapter 25

June 18, 2028 7:45 AM Midwestern time.

              Amy decided it was best to get a fresh start early in the morning as soon as the sun began to rise so that she could travel as far she could possibly go before it began to get dark and she would need to find a place out of the way where she would be unlikely to encounter any of the creatures.

              She decided it was best to wait a day and rest because she was still not feeling very well and wanted to gather up all of her strength and composure before she made the long journey to Los Angeles.

              After a quick breakfast Amy began driving and only took a very brief stop for lunch. She managed to drive all day and by the time the sun was setting she had made it as far as Utah. She found a motel and decided that that might be a good place to spend the night as it was out of the way and it didn't look like there were any other establishments or other signs of habitation where the creatures might dwell for many miles.

              "I had better make sure that it is safe first," she said as she got out of her Humvee and, one by one, looked in each one of the rooms. Once she had finished checking the entire place she concluded that no one had been there probably since the bombardment.

              "This place is so out of the way that there is probably nothing to entice the creatures to come here," she said as she got into her trailer. "But I am not taking any chances. I am going to stay in my well armored trailer surrounded by my high-intensity headlights and I am not going to risk sleeping alone in a motel room, even if it is a pretty nice motel."

              As she gently fell asleep she found herself growing increasingly restless as the night wore on. She still couldn't shake the fact that the creatures might be tracking her across the country somehow. She had no real basis for that belief other than the fact that it just seemed like the creatures were showing up everywhere she went. David and Malcolm and his family had managed to survive, but then again David was in a well-fortified area and Malcolm was in a very out-of-the-way area. But she had been going to major cities such as New York City, Washington DC and Houston. There were probably greater concentrations of creatures there, so maybe she was just being paranoid. But as David had said, paranoid is a good way to stay alive. During the Apocalypse it's only the paranoid that survive, the paranoid and the lucky.

              Still, as she went to sleep she felt more alone than she ever had before. Maybe it was just being at an abandoned motel somewhere in the middle of nowhere in the desert, maybe it was because of all the death she had witnessed recently. Having finally found other people only to lose them rather quickly made her feel more alone than if she had never found anyone in the first place.

              Amy had set her alarm for 7 AM the next morning so that she would wake up bright and early. She actually managed to sleep pretty well and there was no sign that the creatures tried to disturb her while she was asleep. She held up Maria's cross and kissed it. "Maybe you are bringing me luck after all," she said as she placed it back down. "And maybe you will help me to find members of Maria's family so that I can give you back to them. It's a long shot, but then maybe I should be more open to the idea of miracles, given that I am one of the only survivors of something that killed over 8 billion people."

              After eating another quick breakfast and stopping only briefly for lunch she arrived near the outskirts of Los Angeles in the late afternoon at around 3:30 PM. As she got closer and closer to the city there were more crashed cars and other obstacles that she had to navigate, and all of this made her nervous that it could be a breeding ground for the creatures. She decided to drive off out of the urban area and would wait another day.

              "I want to do all of my exploring in a single day," she said as she parked her trailer. "The longer I stay there the more likely there is something is going to go wrong. If I start early in the morning and get out of there before sunset that should be plenty of time to find Maria's apartment and look for any survivors, then get out of there before the creatures wake up. I am not taking any chances on this one. And luckily since this is the brightest time of the year that should give me the maximum amount of time of sunlight to explore."

              Feeling satisfied that she had planned things out in a very careful and reasonable manner, Amy decided to take the rest of the day relaxing and made sure to go to sleep early so that she could wake up first thing in the morning and begin exploring right away.