Awake: A Post-Apocalyptic Novel Page 5

  Does that mean zombies heal? I didn’t ask the question aloud. I didn’t know if that other side of me would answer, but at that moment, I wanted to feel human, sane, and sane people didn’t talk aloud to themselves.

  The voice didn’t answer. I thought it might have shrugged, though.

  If zombies don’t heal, and I did, and that injury happened long enough ago to look the way it did, then I couldn’t have been a zombie.

  Again, I didn’t speak aloud, and still, the other voice didn’t respond. I felt as if it gave me a contemptuous look, which pissed me off.

  I was assuming that the dream had happened, and the wound I was looking at was a bite scar. The nightmare could’ve been something my subconscious made up with the thought of that injury in mind. If I had made it up, and the boy hadn’t bitten me, then I hadn’t been a zombie. I couldn’t have been. I was human.

  The voice rolled its eyes at me.

  Who was I kidding? No one. Even I knew I was full of shit.

  Deep down, I wanted the dream to be real. I wanted that family, that little sister, that day by the river, even if it had ended at the beginning of the zombie apocalypse. And it had been the beginning. I knew it deep in my bones. That day had been too perfect, too happy. There was no feeling of a looming threat hanging over us. No fear that something terrible was about to happen.

  Whatever had happened had done so right then…right, when we heard the first scream. I don’t know if it happened all over the world in that same instant or if it started where we were and spread, but I do know that it was surprising.

  I attempted to go back to sleep after that. I tried to recall the memory, tried to pick it up again from the bite. I wanted to know if I’d healed from it and had changed later or if I turned and healed. I couldn’t imagine zombies being able to recover from an injury. In the movies, they were dead, decaying. Some lived long after they were all but bones, and some looked the same way they had when they’d first turned. Of course, it was all fiction. Each author created their own mythology. Their zombies could be and do anything they wanted. Since there had never been a zombie apocalypse before, the lore could be whatever the person wanted it to be.

  I felt crazy thinking that last line. Of course, no one knew. Zombies weren’t supposed to be real. The outbreak or whatever it was wasn’t meant to happen. Those creatures were supposed to stay in fiction.

  My brain wouldn’t shut down long enough for me to fall too deeply into sleep, so I begrudgingly got out of bed. I washed up in the bathroom, and as I did nearly every day, I examined myself in the mirror. I had a better sense of who I might have been after the dream, but I still didn’t know my name, when my birthday was, my parents’ names, my sister’s name, if I had been married, or had kids. I was old enough, I thought, to have both.

  The wounds I’d woken with had nearly healed. I had more scars than those—a lot more. I had them on the soles of my feet, on my butt, in my armpit…everywhere. Some were big, nasty-looking ones. Most were small, like deep cuts and scratches. I’d been through hell since that day at the river. That was all I knew for sure.

  Finally, I dressed and packed my bags. I felt good, better than I had since waking despite the dream, which meant that I needed to get back on the road.

  As I was passing the hotel lobby, a thought came to me that I couldn’t believe hadn’t occurred to me the day before when I’d been in there. They would have newspapers and dated receipts. Or, at least, they should have those things.

  “I’m an idiot,” I said aloud, startling myself a little.

  I chuckled and entered the lobby. I didn’t find any newspapers, but I did find pieces of paper behind the counter that had a few July dates written on them. One looked like a handwritten receipt for a stay in a room on the other side of the hotel. It was dated the 2nd of July only a few weeks earlier than what I’d found at the police station, though if it was from the same year, I wasn’t sure. I didn’t know if the power had been out by then or if they’d been having computer problems because I didn’t see anything else that looked like a receipt.

  The gas station and restaurant were just as fruitless since everything was on the computer. I found a few old receipts, but none for July. I guess the end of the world could have happened that fast. Just a few days, two weeks tops, didn’t seem enough time to demolish an entire country and possibly a planet.

  I gave up worrying about dates after that. I still cared about when it happened, how it happened, and how long it took to happen, but I had more important questions I wanted answers to than those.

  I did a bit more scavenging before I left the city. Not for the first time, I wondered where all the live people were. Hell, I wanted to know where all the zombies were. That zombie woman and I couldn’t possibly be the only two beings on the planet.

  What if we are, though? I asked myself, but only in my head.

  I’m not sure we are.

  But what if we are?

  We aren’t. But so what if we are. There isn’t anything we can do about it. We’ll have to go on living.

  Should we get the zombie woman, so we aren’t alone?

  Hell no. She’s libel to eat us in our sleep. Besides, if another live person sees us with her, they might run from us.

  True.

  Besides, you can’t train her to do anything. She can’t talk. She won’t be much of a conversationalist.

  What about that stuff in the needles? That man I found had more. If I was a zombie, and he shot me with that, and I woke up, then I could go back and get the case, then find her and give it to her. Maybe it would wake her as it did me.

  I’d been too worried about finding food and other people to bring the case with me. I’d thought…hoped, I’d be able to take someone in authority back to the house and get the syringes then. That hadn’t happened, and I hadn’t thought about it since until that moment.

  We don’t know what was in those syringes. Of course, the worst thing that would happen was that I would kill the creature, but there’s no reason to backtrack. Just keep moving forward. You’re trying to procrastinate. You now have an idea of what happened to you, and you’re afraid to face any more.

  Shut up.

  The other voice was right, but that didn’t mean I liked or wanted to own up to it.

  The closer I got to the Alabama state line, the more cars I found. The more vehicles there were, the more bodies I had to pretend weren’t there. Most were too decayed to tell if they were human or zombie, but their locations in and around the automobiles suggested that the majority were human when they died. They’d died fighting, but with the military vehicles scattered amongst them, I wasn’t sure if they were fighting their fellow humans or zombies or both.

  I could imagine that life had been chaotic in those early days of the outbreak. The event seemed to have happened spontaneously with no rhyme or reason to who turned. Did everyone who was going to become a zombie turn at once, or was the transformation gradual? Did a group of people turn on the first day, another group on the second, and so on?

  Based on the dream—if I was a zombie before I woke—the zombies could turn others with a bite, so that had to help speed things along.

  For hours, my brain replayed different scenarios of how the outbreak happened and why. Nothing I’d seen or read up to that point gave me any specific ideas other than the unimaginable had happened.

  Around dusk that night, while looking for a place to sleep, I heard a noise that sounded like someone going through a nearby car, but when I investigated, I found nothing, not even an animal. I hadn’t had a single thought about animals until that moment. I hadn’t seen so much as a cat roaming amongst the vehicles since I woke. Had they become zombies as well, or had the zombies fed on them when the humans died out?

  That night, I went to bed terrified. I found a house with a dark but comfortable basement. I crawled into the closet of that basement and slept fitfully.

  Chapter 6 – Dead

  I barely slept that night. I k
ept jerking awake, thinking I heard voices, footsteps, and other random sounds. A search of the house and grounds just after daybreak showed no signs of life. I didn’t think I’d dreamed of the noises, but I could’ve.

  What dreams I had when I did manage to sleep had felt real enough that I was sure they were memories. Fortunately, I didn’t get to spend too much time in the dreams with all my waking up to make sure I was still alone. I dreamed of seeing the dead girl in the backyard, surrounded by bodies. I dreamed of stumbling through the house that I was sure was my mother’s. I dreamed of being terribly hungry with no source of food anywhere. I dreamed of being chased and of chasing.

  I thought about taking the day to rest, considering I hadn’t had much sleep, but I was so close to the Alabama state line, and a part of me wanted to cross it yesterday. I didn’t believe I would miraculously remember everything when I entered the state, but I hoped that seeing familiar settings would jog my memory a bit faster.

  I kept a watch out for movement as I walked. If anyone was following me, the person stayed well out of hearing range. After a while, I decided I was paranoid, not that that stopped me from being vigilant.

  Traffic kept getting tighter, and I had a strange feeling that people had been trying to flee Mississippi into Alabama. I couldn’t think of a reason for them to do that. Alabama didn’t have anything that Mississippi wouldn’t have in the way of keeping the people safe from the zombies. At least, I didn’t think it did.

  Maybe UAB found a cure or vaccine, my inner voice said.

  “Now, why the hell would I know that UAB was the University of Alabama at Birmingham, but I didn’t know my own damned name,” I said aloud and startled myself.

  The sound of my voice was so shocking that I paused to look around, searching for the source before realizing I was it.

  I should probably talk to myself a bit more often so that I don’t forget how to speak, and so the sound won’t frighten me.

  “Yes, you probably should,” I told myself, speaking aloud again.

  “I know. But I don’t always think to speak with no one to talk to besides myself.”

  “That’s probably because you went so long without being able to.”

  “Let’s not go through that. I don’t want to think about what I might have been. Not right now. I want to focus on getting to Alabama in one piece.”

  “Fine. What would you like to talk about?”

  “I don’t know. Do you think someone is following us?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think anyone else is out there. If someone were, the person would’ve stepped forward by now.”

  “Really. I’m talking to myself like a crazy person. They probably think I’m potentially dangerous.”

  “Correct. Which means if someone were there, we’ve scared them away.”

  “Shit.”

  “Yep. Next topic.”

  “I don’t feel like talking anymore.”

  “Fine.”

  The lack of noise was just as shocking as my voice when I stopped talking. I should’ve preferred the quiet, but the silence allowed me time to get lost in my head—not in having an internal conversation, but in thoughts of things I did remember. I could bring up images of hamburgers, of fingernail files, of car keys, and a laundry list of other stuff, but nothing about me.

  I began to worry that my brain was purposefully blocking those memories. Why? I wasn’t sure. Possibly to save me from the heartache of knowing what had happened to everyone I loved, what I’d changed into, and what I’d done.

  I shook my head, forcing those thoughts away, proving my point.

  Before I knew it, I was standing at the state line. I knew I was there, not because of the large green sign that proclaimed my location, but because of the roadblock and dead bodies. Military vehicles, civilian trucks, and sheriffs’ cars lined the road along with concrete barriers on the Alabama side of the line. Dead bodies littered both sides of the barricade.

  Judging by the looks of things, Alabamians were adamant that no Mississippian would enter their state via Highway 72. One would think that they would have more important things to do than stop others from finding safety, but maybe not.

  I didn’t want to wade through the sea of bodies. Neither did I want to walk miles out of the way to find another road into the state. The smell was terrible at the line, which was odd. Most of the bodies I’d come across had long since passed the point of smelling like rotted meat.

  The answer to the smell became apparent quickly, though, when I stumbled over a body and came face first with a newly killed zombie. It had only been truly dead for a few days.

  The body had a syringe-dart sticking from its neck. I plucked the thing out and looked at it carefully. The military man I’d found had syringes like that, and it was just like the one that had been in my leg.

  I’m betting whatever was in the dart was what had changed me. That zombie hadn’t woken, though.

  You don’t know that I was a zombie, I thought, countering my first thought. You don’t know that both items held the same thing.

  No, but it’s a safe guess.

  Really? If I was a zombie, and now I’m not because of what was in that syringe, wouldn’t this person also be alive?

  No. Maybe it didn’t work. The body looks to have belonged to a large man. Perhaps the dosage wasn’t strong enough.

  Whatever. Believe what you want.

  I stopped arguing with myself and began searching through the bodies. I found more than a dozen freshly killed zombies, all with darts sticking out of some part of their body. None of them showed signs of resorting back to their human selves.

  That doesn’t prove anything, I thought.

  No, it doesn’t, the voice in my head countered.

  None of the vehicles on the Alabama side of the line held any information either. They’d all been there for months, possibly even years. Whoever had taken down the zombies hadn’t been driving one of them. I couldn’t see how they’d been driving anything, period, with how deep the vehicles were on the Alabama side.

  I found more dead zombies on that side with darts sticking out of them.

  Okay, so maybe…

  Don’t dwell on it. We may never get all the answers. Just worry about finding out who we are. Everything else is secondary.

  I nodded and dropped the dart I held before making my way out of the barricade and down the highway.

  I was within a few hours’ walk of the first large city in Alabama when night began to fall. I wouldn’t have made it any further anyway, so I slept in another trailer. That one was smaller and more run-down than the one from the other night. However, it was clean, had a soft bed, a few cans of food, and other supplies.

  I slept hard that night, and if I dreamed, I don’t remember much of it. A few things I’d run across that day had felt familiar, but not familiar enough that it seemed to jog any memories. Even my contemplation over the darts and syringes as I fell asleep didn’t warrant any vivid dreams.

  If anyone was following me, I didn’t see or hear them that night or the next morning when I woke.

  I grew nervous as I prepared to start my day. I didn’t know why. The feeling made me sure that the next large city was where I needed to go. I would find the answers I needed there. That thought brought on a whole new level of nerves. Did I want to know the answers I might discover there? Yeah, I wanted to know my name and who I was, but I didn’t want to relive any more memories of people I love dying. If I had been a zombie, I didn’t want to find out if I’d killed anyone I loved. I had no desire to know if I’d killed anyone I didn’t know for that matter, but I feared I was about to find out everything.

  My pace was slow. I purposefully took my time, taking in my surroundings. The landscape in that section of Alabama was shocking. Aside from the cars, the dead bodies, the emptiness, and random bits of destruction, the parts of Mississippi I’d seen didn’t seem to have suffered much during th
e outbreak. Alabama, on the other hand, looked like a war zone. Something had leveled buildings and homes, craters from bombs and explosions littered the land, and ash settled over everything.

  The destruction made it hard to tell if anything familiar surrounded me. I thought I recognized sections of billboards or business signs that were still standing or still legible. For all I knew, there could be hundreds of those same billboards and business signs all over the state. The remains of a large restaurant I inspected brought on a few memories of me sitting in a booth, laughing. However, the flashes were gone so quickly that I wasn’t able to say for sure I was in the same restaurant.

  If Alabama was suffering so much, why had so many people wanted into the state? You would think people would have been fleeing, not trying to get in it, but I hadn’t seen any evidence of the former.

  When I reached the intersection of Highways 72 and 43, I turned north to enter the heart of the tri-cities area. I saw a sign that might have advertised a high school or college, the shell of a Waffle House, sections of a hotel, and a wide-open field covered in bodies and military tents.

  The field brought to mind images of Farris Wheels, hot dogs, cotton candy, and strobing lights. The memories were so startling that they nearly knocked me on my ass. Nothing that resembled a fair lay before me, however. When I took in the area, the fair was all my mind could see, though.

  The images came faster and were a bit sharper, the closer I got to the field of bodies. I tried holding onto certain ones and focusing on specific people and the words they were saying, but the onslaught was so overpowering that I had to let it come as it chose.

  When I tripped over one of the dead and landed on my knees in front of another, I realized that the field stank and that the bodies were fresh. They were not as new as the ones I saw in Mississippi, but the creatures had died within the last few weeks. And they were zombies. I didn’t inspect them all. There were too many to attempt that, but I saw enough to know that every single one in the field had once been a zombie.