Awake: A Post-Apocalyptic Novel Read online

  The walk to the house, which was only a step or two above a shack, felt as if it took forever. I was so exhausted by the time I got to it that I all but collapsed on the front porch. I curled into a ball, with the case of syringes tucked under me, and instantly fell asleep.

  I don’t know how long I slept. I was pretty sure it was through the rest of the day and night, as the sun was rising when I uncurled myself. To be honest, though, I could have slept for days and not known it.

  I hurt everywhere when I woke and nearly burst into tears at the pain. The day before or whenever it was when I first became me again, I’d seen cuts and bruises, gouges, and places where skin and tissue was missing. I hadn’t registered any of it as anything abnormal or painful. That morning, I did. I felt the pain of every one of those places, and they were all over me. I even felt warm liquid seeping from many of the areas.

  Screaming out at the movements, I forced myself to stand and look at my body again. Sure enough, I was bleeding. Everywhere.

  Some of the minor wounds I remembered from before looked as if they were healing, which was a plus. However, the larger, deeper ones were not.

  Praying that the house wasn’t as abandoned as it seemed, I stood, forgetting all about the box of syringes. I trailed blood across the porch, through the threshold, over the light-colored carpet inside the house, and into the bathroom. The residents didn’t have much of a medical kit, but I made do with what I had. A number of my wounds needed stitching, but I didn’t have the stomach or the supplies to do it. I took a sponge bath, cleaning the wounds the best I could before bandaging them.

  Doing all of that sapped my energy. I crawled into the nearest bed and slept for nearly another twenty-four hours.

  Chapter 2 – Dead World

  The next time I woke, I was starving, which wasn’t surprising, considering I hadn’t eaten since waking in the field. The thought of food hadn’t even crossed my mind until just then. I couldn’t remember my life before, but I was sure I’d never been as hungry as I was at that moment.

  My spinning head and rumbling stomach made it almost impossible to move throughout the house in search of sustenance.

  Thoughts of what I’d thrown up two days before tried to kill my appetite. The growling shooed the images away. Unfortunately, my mind replaced those graphic flashes with ones of things that made my hunger worse.

  I didn’t find much food in the kitchen other than a few bottles of water and a couple of cans of soup. I drank and ate it all in one sitting. Seconds after consumption, the food and water tried to come back up. I refused to let it.

  With that ache taken care of, I went to the bathroom to check on my wounds. More had healed while I slept. However, the worst of them continued to look disgusting and on the verge of becoming infected. I cleaned all the wounds again and changed the bandages. Afterward, I washed up and put on clothes I found in one of the closets.

  My body was tired from those simple actions. I couldn’t give in to the urge to crawl back into the bed, though. I couldn’t stay in that house any longer. My need to know what happened was gnawing at me.

  I recognized what a television was the second I saw it in the living room. Hitting the buttons didn’t turn it on. Further inspection of what items in the house I recognized proved that nothing worked that required electricity. The phone on the wall didn’t even have a dial tone.

  I had injuries that needed someone more experienced than myself to tend to them. Without more food or medical supplies, the house wasn’t the best place for me to stay. I also wanted to find out who I was and what happened to me.

  Furthermore, I felt obligated to notify the authorities about the body in the field, even if it got me in trouble.

  I’d stared at myself for a long time in the bathroom mirror that morning…trying to remember me. I didn’t recognize my face, my body, nothing. I struggled to recall my name, my birthday, who my parents were. All I got was a bunch of blanks. The understanding that I should know me but didn’t should’ve made me cry. I didn’t have time to break down that way. I felt frustrated. I was angry. I was scared. The emotions only made me determined. They chased away any tears that might have flowed.

  The clothes I wore had no form of I.D. in them. The house didn’t have any photos of me or of anyone I recognized. I picked up the phone and began hitting numbers, seeing if I dialed someone unconsciously, but nothing. How I could know what a phone was and how it worked and not know my damned name pissed me off more.

  After putting the few useful items I found in the house in a bag, I left. I followed the dirt driveway down to a paved but broken country road. I stood at the intersection, looking right and left and at the field before me, trying to decide which way I should go. Neither direction felt right, especially not the field and the woods surrounding it, so I decided to go right for a while. I could always turn around and go the other way.

  Roughly two hours later, my stomach began to growl again. I had long since grown thirsty. There had been nothing in sight for some time. No vehicle passed had me. I saw no more homes. I heard no animals. The world around me was completely and utterly silent. It was more than a little creepy.

  While I walked, I tried to think, tried to conjure images of people and names I should know. I continued to get a whole bunch of zilch.

  After I’d been on the road for nearly four hours, I came upon a stalled car. The vehicle was a red, two-door Oldsmobile. The driver’s side door was hanging open, and what looked like mud caked the window and side of the car. The stain trailed from the vehicle, across the road, and into the grass.

  I grew nervous as I stepped toward the car, but I didn’t let myself shy away from it. The vehicle might hold answers. It might have been mine. It might have food or water in it. Something. And I would take anything at that point that helped me figure out what the hell was happening.

  The mud ended up being blood and other gory stuff that had long since dried. I did my best not to touch any of it. There were no people or parts of people in the car, thank God. I didn’t find any photos. I did see a registration that said the vehicle belonged to a Howard Stanfield and that he lived in Florence, Alabama. I knew the name wasn’t feminine, which meant it couldn’t be mine. That didn’t mean I wasn’t related to Howard in some way, though.

  I shoved the paper into my pocket. I didn’t know where Florence, Alabama, was, let alone where it was in relation to where I was at that moment. If it was nearby, I could inspect the address to see if I found anything connecting me to Howard or the town.

  Someone had loaded the car with stuff. Most of it was superficial things people only thought they needed. There were some food supplies in the trunk. Nearly all of it had ruined. That didn’t stop me from eating a pack of stale crackers and storing the rest of the box in a backpack I’d found in the back seat. The bottles of water I found were hot, but I drank two and added a few more to the pack. I couldn’t put the entire case in there because then I wouldn’t be able to carry it. I put enough to last me for the rest of the day. At least, I hoped they would.

  There were a few cans of tuna. I ate one—thankful they had the pop tops—and stored the others.

  By the time I left the car, I’d loaded the pack with a handful of other things I had thought might still be useful.

  I considered searching the field on either side of the car for the person or persons who’d been in it before deciding I didn’t want to see another dead body. One was enough. I did tell myself that along with the dead body in the field, I needed to report the apparent accident. I found it odd that no one had. If there was only one person in the car or if all were hurt, then there wasn’t anyone to notify the authorities. Someone had to have passed by it, though. The dried blood and rotted food meant that the car had been on the road for a while.

  I came across another stalled car, a four-door, purple Saturn, a few miles up the road. It was too far away from the first to have been in the same accident. Judging by the condition of the scene, it had happened re
cently.

  I told myself that I didn’t need to get close enough to it to inspect it for supplies. The smell surrounding it was nearly as bad as the smell from what I’d vomited up after waking in the field. Bodies hung out of the car, and two more were in the road on either side of the vehicle. I needed to get close enough to see if I recognized any of them, but I couldn’t make my legs move.

  My brain kept telling me I should investigate. It said that the people might be my family or my friends. I might have been in the car with them. Nothing it said, though, convinced me to move. If those people had been my family, friends, my link to who I was, I didn’t want to know. I didn’t want that image to be my last one of them.

  I argued with myself for a bit. Eventually, my brain won, and I moved. Slowly, I approached the scene. From the looks of things, it was evident that everyone was dead. I opened the back-passenger door first, trying not to look at the corpses in the front seat and on the ground.

  The back seat was loaded down with supplies. Some of it was stale or rotten from being in the hot car. Others were edible. I added a few more items to my pack, but not much. I didn’t know how much I would need or would be able to carry.

  I found picture albums, but none of the faces I saw were mine. I found a gun and some ammo. I didn’t know if I knew how to shoot or would need to, but I took them. With all the dead bodies I’d seen since waking, I felt sure that I’d woken up in the middle of something terrible. If I did, then I needed protection. I wish I knew why I needed the protection.

  I didn’t search the bodies. I found no evidence that suggested that exploring them would be fruitful. I simply left them.

  A small part of me felt terrible for abandoning them like that. I wondered for the first time if I should have taken a moment to bury the dead I’d come across. I should have at least put the bodies back in the car. Or, in the case of the man in the field, in the house I’d stayed in, to get them out of the elements and possibly give them dignity or something.

  Another part of me reminded me that they were crime scenes. I was going to be in enough trouble for disturbing the scenes. My fingerprints would at all three sites, making me a suspect. If that finger belonged to the man in the field, then I was going to be in a hell of a lot of trouble.

  A third part told the first two they were ridiculous. I was in the middle of the apocalypse. I didn’t need to waste time burying people or worrying about fingerprints. No police officer or investigator was going to be checking out the bodies. Those people were going to stay right where they were until their bones turned to ash.

  The thought felt true…truer than any other I’d had since waking. I had come to in the middle of the apocalypse. That explained the silence that had settled over the world. It explained the dead bodies I kept coming across, the finger I’d thrown up, the syringes, and the man in military garb. The empty house and cars full of supplies were also indications that people were running from something terrible.

  I shut my thoughts down after that last one. I didn’t want to think about any of it, especially the finger. There were some possibilities as to why I would have a finger in my stomach, but not a single one of them did I want to explore.

  I turned away from the car and the bodies and started back down the road.

  Chapter 3 – On the Road

  As the sun began to set, I spotted a house off in the distance. The structure was the first one that I’d seen since I’d set out on my journey.

  I was more than a little tired. My body hurt. My feet were sore. I was sticky and stinky. Blood had seeped from my wounds, and sweat had drenched my body.

  That second house was a bit nicer than the first I’d stayed in, but only by a little bit. The home had more rooms and supplies, and it showed signs that people had been there in the last few months. I could tell by both places, the empty roads I passed, and the miles of fields that filled my vision that I was deep in rural country.

  In that house, I found antibiotics, bandages, water, and more canned food—not a lot, but enough to last me through the night and the next day without having to use what was in my pack.

  Whereas some of my worst wounds had opened and bled during the walk, my smaller ones were healing. I didn’t know enough about who I was before to be suspicious of how quickly my wounds were healing.

  The bathroom had a full-length mirror. For a long time, I stood naked in front of it. I tried, not for the first or last time, to remember who I was. I couldn’t figure out why I had so many wounds. I also didn’t understand why, as much as I hurt, I wasn’t in more pain considering how bad some of my injuries were.

  Had I been in a car wreck? I’d woken too far from the road for a crash to throw me from a vehicle, but it was a possibility. Had I been in an explosion of some kind? I looked like one of those victims I’d seen on television who’d lived through a natural disaster or terrorist attack. How I could vaguely remember seeing those images on a screen and not know my name was aggravating.

  Something had happened to me, that was obvious, but what? Why couldn’t I remember? Why hadn’t I met another live person? What the hell was going on?

  Once I’d cleaned up, I combed the house. The phone didn’t work, nor did the electricity. I found a laptop, but the battery had died. I didn’t see a newspaper. I didn’t see anything, not even a diary that told me what happened.

  I did know that the last people who’d stayed in that house weren’t the home’s original occupants. For one, the clothes inside the bags I’d found in the bedroom weren’t the same size or quality as the ones hanging in the closet. The photos in the bags didn’t match the images in the pictures on the walls. And, the two sets of graves in the backyard had different last names attached to them. The second group must have decided to follow in the footsteps of the home’s original occupants after their people had died. The wooden grave markers didn’t have dates…just names scratched hastily on them.

  Someone must have lived to do the digging, but I didn’t find any bodies in or around the house. I hoped the person or persons weren’t one of the people I’d seen on the road. I also prayed that if they returned, they wouldn’t kick me out of the house or worse.

  Maybe, they’d recognize me.

  I slept fitfully that night. My dreams were strange, scary, and had me tossing and turning. When I woke, I tried to recall them. All I got were flashes of images that I couldn’t make out. They left me feeling uneasy.

  Nothing that I’d seen since I woke had been pleasant. Empty fields, dead bodies, a finger that came out of my stomach, and a quiet world. None of it made me feel the way the images from the night had. I felt sure I’d been reliving past events, not having nightmares. That feeling made me a little sick to my stomach and scared of what I might find out about myself.

  The fear didn’t stop me from leaving the next morning. It didn’t keep me from wanting to know what happened to me and the rest of the world. Nothing about the house or the surrounding area jogged any memories or sense of familiarity, and I planned to keep moving until something did.

  I came to a small town about two hours after I left the second house. The city was a wreck—shattered store windows, cars overturned, and dark stains covered sidewalks and buildings.

  The further into town I got and the more I explored the businesses and restaurants, the more bodies I saw. Most of them were old, decayed bodies. Whatever had hit the town had done so perhaps two-or-three years ago. Why hadn’t anyone cleaned up the place? Didn’t FEMA or some other government program help in national disasters? Someone had to know what had happened to the town, didn’t they?

  I raided one of the clothing stores for things that would fit me better than what I’d scavenged from the homes. I didn’t feel sorry for stealing the items. If those bodies had been there as long as they appeared, no one was coming back that would care. I got a bigger backpack, one that was more suited for an extended camping trip, to put my food, supplies, and clothes in. The pack was much heavier than what I was used to carryi
ng, but I hoped I wouldn’t have to have it for much longer.

  A looted gas station at the end of town still had some packaged foods, warm bottles of water, and other drinks in the storage room. I was iffy about how safe it would all be to eat and drink, but I didn’t have any other options.

  I crammed my pack full of food before searching the store for other needed items. I found matches, lighters, hair clips I could use once my hair was clean and adequately brushed—it was too long to wear down all the time in the heat—and roadmaps.

  From what I could gather by looking at the maps, postcards, and other souvenirs, I was in rural northern Mississippi. The name of the state sounded familiar, but not like home. I felt I might be close to home, but how near? I studied the maps, trying to pick a direction. East felt familiar, but when I looked at the ones for Tennessee, Alabama, and Georgia, nothing screamed home. I read over city names, but I didn’t recognize any other than the one that had been on the man’s car registration I’d found on my way into town.

  In frustration, I slung the maps down and slid to the floor in the middle of the store. I wanted to cry. My eyes felt as if tears were about to burst from them, but none came. I screamed instead. Then I cursed. The sound of the profanity coming from my mouth shocked me. Until that moment, I hadn’t spoken aloud.

  “Holy shit,” I said and laughed.

  I sounded different than I did in my head, but only a little. The words were loud in the empty store. Why hadn’t I tried to speak before? Had I not known that I could? Had I even realized that I should be able to talk?

  When I realized I was conversing in my head, I said, “What the hell is going on? Why the hell had I woken up inside some strange, horror or science-fiction movie? And why do I fucking know what horror and science-fiction movies are, but I don’t know my name?”

  No answers came to mind.

  I sighed, snatched up the maps, and left the store. I needed to know where I was so that I could find my location on the map in order to pick a travel route.