Awake: A Post-Apocalyptic Novel Page 6

  Had someone lured them here?

  Had someone brought them here for some reason?

  None that I could see had head injuries or any signs of death other than the fact that they were zombies. Someone had carefully laid out their bodies, which I found odd. If the field was a body dump, wouldn’t whoever had done it just thrown them into a pile?

  The scene felt weird. That other voice in my head screamed at me to run away from the place, but my curiosity wouldn’t allow it.

  I zigzagged my way to the back of the field where row upon row of military tents lined the bodies. The tents were of no help. They weren’t all empty, but what was in most of them were stripped cots, chairs, a few random items of clothing, and folding tables. I didn’t find any personal objects of the people stationed there. For the life of me, I couldn’t understand what had happened.

  I sought out the freshest bodies and examined them the best I could for signs of what might have occurred there. Some had marks around their hands, feet, and mouths that indicated that the soldiers might have tied them up at one point. I thought I even found needle marks that might have looked like mine in their arms and necks. However, I couldn’t say for sure with the level of decomposition.

  Had someone experimented on these zombies?

  That had to be it. The government had needed the zombies for a reason. Someone had taken good care of them, considering what they were.

  I looked around the field again with that in mind and noticed that there was the occasional gap between the dead. The spaces were just wide enough for a missing body to have been.

  Had those zombies woken up human as I had?

  I couldn’t believe I was admitting to myself that it was a possibility that I’d been a zombie. The evidence for it was mounting. I couldn’t keep denying it.

  For a long time, I stood in the middle of that field and looked at the bodies. I could have been one of them. I should have been. I wished I was one. If I’d been a zombie…if I’d killed people, then I wanted to be dead like those at my feet.

  A wave of fear and sadness so encompassing swept over me. I dropped to my knees and cried. I cried for the person I’d once been. I cried for all the people I might have hurt and their families. I cried for my family and for my friends. I cried for all the people around me. They’d been human once. They’d had lives, families, and friends. They’d had the world until they’d turned, then they’d become monsters.

  I hoped that whatever the military had done to them, had been painless and swift.

  Once I was in control of myself, I got up and headed further into town. I didn’t see the banks, restaurants, beauty parlors, toy stores, car washes, auto supply stores, and other landscapes that would have been familiar to me had I been paying attention to where I was going. I didn’t notice street signs or bends in the road that I was unconsciously following. I just walked until I came to a three-bedroom, two-bath brick house in a middle-class neighborhood.

  My car wasn’t in the driveway. That was my first thought when I reached the house. Of course, it wasn’t. I hadn’t been home when the outbreak occurred. As I stood on the sidewalk, looking at the house, I knew it was mine, yet couldn’t recall any memories of living there. Images of things that had been in my yard or decorating the porch flashed before my mind, but they were just images…photographs. None of them came with any emotion, any sense of time, any glimpses of me with those objects.

  The second thing I noticed was that my front door was open. I didn’t think I would have left that open. The outside of the house looked cold, empty, forgotten, but not destroyed. I didn’t see broken windows, damage from fighting, decayed body parts, or dried blood.

  No one had been here in the beginning, so there hadn’t been a need for a fight to take place here. The closer I got to the door, the more I was able to see that someone had forced it open. Someone had needed my supplies, it seemed.

  Tentatively, I pushed the door open a bit wider and peered inside. The house wasn’t a wreck. Items from an end table were on the floor, cushions from the sofa were out of place, the bathroom was bare of necessities, as was the kitchen, and someone had stripped my bed and raided my closet. I still had the supplies I’d accumulated over the last few days, and none of the missing items held an emotional attachment for me, so I wasn’t too distraught over not having them, but I still felt violated. I reminded myself that if the owners of the homes I’d taken supplies from ever came back, they’d probably feel the same way.

  I walked the house for a good half hour or more, surveying what little damage it sustained and let the fragments of memories come to me. I wished I had more than stationary images, though. I wanted to know what it was like to have lived in the home, to cook in the kitchen, to have curled on the sofa with a good book.

  I knew I read a lot by the number of books on the bookshelf. I knew I liked the color purple because that was the predominant color in the house. I had owned a cat at one time. Empty water and food bowls were in the kitchen, and an empty litter box was in the laundry room. The house told me so many things about myself, but I didn’t feel a connection to the knowledge.

  Eventually, I wore myself out. I stored my bags in the hall closet, retrieved a bit of food, and went to the kitchen to eat. The house didn’t have power or running water, but it did have clean plates, bowls, and utensils.

  As I was sitting at the counter eating, I saw a stack of papers sitting next to the phone. I pulled them to me and saw that they were bills. I picked up one and read the name on the envelope.

  Olivia Stone.

  That was my name.

  Liv.

  People used to call me Liv.

  Suddenly that memory hit me.

  I burst into tears.

  Chapter 7 – 1st Victim

  Once I’d stopped crying, I said my name aloud. I said it over and over again, swapping the first name occasionally for my nickname. Every time I said the words, I felt a part of myself come back. I still didn’t recall my parents’ names, my sister’s name, my cat’s name, the name of my first love, or what my favorite dessert was. That didn’t stop me from feeling as if I’d just taken a giant step closer to becoming whole again.

  Before I could begin searching the house for my birth certificate, photo albums, and the like, that would give me more insight into who I was, darkness fell. I used the one candle I had to make up my bed with sheets I found in a spare bedroom. I was exhausted from the day, which seemed to be the norm for me in the post-apocalyptic world, so I crashed quickly after that.

  Not too long after shutting my eyes, I found myself back at the party. The dream didn’t pick up where it had left off, but it didn’t start from the beginning of the day either. It began at the first scream and went from there.

  After the kid bit me and the world went dark, it stayed that way for a long time. When I woke again, I wasn’t me anymore, or I wasn’t wholly me, and I felt me slipping away.

  A fog had settled over the world, which was odd, considering the day had been hot and bright. I was lying on my back next to my mother’s flowerbed. My body felt as if it were going numb. I couldn’t feel my left leg at all.

  I rolled my head to the side to see that someone new was beside me. The person was my mother, I was sure of it, but she was missing part of her face. Tentatively, I rose to a seated position. I felt disconnected, light, and oddly hungry.

  My mother, it seemed, had drug the little boy off me and had been trying to doctor the wound on my leg when one of the zombies had attacked her. The sight of her still warm, still bleeding body made my insides groan with hunger pains. That wasn’t right. She was my mother. She was a person. What was left of her was disgusting, mutilated. Nothing about her should have been appealing. My stomach didn’t agree with my thoughts, though.

  I rolled onto my right leg and rose to a standing position. From the look of my wounded leg, I should have been howling in agony. I shouldn’t have been able to apply any pressure to it whatsoever, but I was able to lim
p on it. The leg wouldn’t bend, but I felt no pain.

  I looked down at my mother. A fading thought told me that I should do something with her body. I should carry it inside, but I did nothing. I was growing numb. I knew I should feel something for her, for the other dead or dying people around me, but I didn’t. I couldn’t even remember the names of most of them, and the ones I could were a struggle to bring to mind.

  My only real thought was that I needed to get inside the house. Inside was safe. For who? I wasn’t sure. Was I trying to save myself from the creatures or save the humans from me?

  I don’t know if I shut the front door behind me or not. I don’t know what I planned to do once I was inside the house. I don’t even know how long I was in there before someone came to let me out.

  I do know that as soon as I was inside, I didn’t have any idea where I was, who I was, why I was. I knew I was trapped. I knew I was hungry. Oh, so very hungry, and I had no food.

  I paced the house, bumped into closed doors, tripped over fallen objects, and moaned loudly for a long time before going still and collapsing to the floor.

  I had no concept of time, no thought, and no dreams, just vast nothing until the scent of food roused me from my hibernation. Sounds came after the smell. I didn’t know what the sounds were, but I knew they meant someone not like me was nearby.

  Despite my growing hunger, I couldn’t move no matter how close the scent grew. I’d been immobile for so long that my body had become stiff, and my brain had forgotten how to command it to move. I’d have to wait for the food to come to me, and eventually, it did.

  The food didn’t know I was there at first. It propped open the front door, which meant I could get out when I was able to move again. After a short search of the house, it found me behind the sofa. It knelt over me. When it did, my body came alive. The hunger I’d been feeling for so long drove me. I sank my teeth deep into the foods’ neck and came away with the most fantastic tasting flesh and warm blood to help wash it down.

  My food died too soon, and its meat body turned bitter and nasty not long after that, but I’d been able to eat enough to have the strength I needed to escape.

  Oddly enough, I didn’t wake screaming or crying. I awoke feeling sick and numb. If the dream had been a memory, which by then I was sure it was, I’d been a zombie at one time, and I’d killed people. That girl I’d eaten—the person my zombie-brain had recognized as food—hadn’t been much older than my sister, and she hadn’t been my last meal by a long shot.

  I lay in the quiet of my room that morning, replaying the dream. The girl hadn’t dressed as if she were in the middle of the zombie apocalypse. Much of her body was exposed. I couldn’t remember seeing a weapon, and she hadn’t understood that the pallor of my skin and the lack of head wound meant that I was still alive—in a manner of speaking. She’d bent over me as if she thought I was a sleeping survivor.

  I had felt as if I’d lain on that floor for years, but maybe I’d only rested for a few hours or a few days. Surely, if it had been weeks, months, or years anyone who’d come to explore the house would’ve had on suitable protection.

  The few bits of cloth I’d gotten while eating her hadn’t tasted good, so I’d learned to stay away from those areas. If she’d had on proper clothing, I wouldn’t have been able to kill her, not easily at least.

  I chided myself for getting angry with the girl. She wasn’t to blame for me killing her, the boy who’d bit me was. No, that wasn’t right either. He couldn’t help what he did to me any more than I could prevent what I’d done to the girl. None of us were to blame. Whoever or whatever had caused the outbreak was. I could be angry and upset over what had happened, but I couldn’t blame the children or myself for how things played out. I didn’t want to face the girl’s family if they were still alive; neither did I want to see the boy’s parents. Chances were high that I never would, not in this existence anyway, but the thought of the possibility made my stomach hurt.

  To take my mind off what that little boy had turned me into, I got out of bed, dressed, and proceeded to discover who I’d been before my transformation.

  Photos told me that my sister’s name was Janie, my mother was Claire, and my father was unknown. I’m sure my mother knew who he was, of course, but he wasn’t on my birth certificate, nor did I have a photo of him. Janie’s father, naturally, wasn’t mine. His name was Nate, and my mother had met and married him when I was in my early teens.

  From what I could gather, my mother had had me at sixteen. My grandparents, her parents, Margaret and Carl Stone, with whom I shared my last name, didn’t look happy in any of my childhood photos. The images made me sad. They could’ve at least pretended for my sake. Judging by my expression, they hadn’t, and I’d felt the disappointment they had for my mother and my untimely birth.

  My mother, on the other hand, looked ecstatic. Even in the picture of her holding me for the first time, she looked as if she couldn’t be happier. The joy in her eyes made me love her a little. I didn’t know her. I couldn’t drum up any past emotions while looking at the photos, but seeing her told me that she’d been a good mother, a loving mother. My heart ached to have that part of my life back.

  She’d died saving me. I don’t know if she’d tried to get to my sister. I wasn’t selfish enough to believe our mother chose me over Janie, but no matter how things had played out, she’d died attempting to save me, and that meant the world to me. The thought also made me hate myself a little. If that boy hadn’t attacked me, she wouldn’t have tried to save me, and she wouldn’t have died. That line of reasoning made me cry. It also caused my inner voice to speak up for the first time in a day or so.

  “You’re acting stupid. You know that, right?”

  “How so?”

  “Zombies attacked the party. They didn’t come for the cake and Jet Ski rides. They came to eat your flesh. No matter how things played out, most of you were going to die, and the rest were going to turn. No one was going to survive the attack. You didn’t cause her death. The zombies did.”

  I knew that was the logical way to look at the situation, but I was too emotional to think logically.

  I only half-heartedly flipped through the rest of the photos in the album I held before putting it back on the shelf. I couldn’t look at the smiling faces of my family and people I couldn’t remember anymore. I was also depressed by and relieved by the fact that I hadn’t had a family. I found no indications in the house that I’d had any children or a spouse. I took comfort in the fact that my death hadn’t left my kids orphaned.

  The office in the back of the house was my last point of exploration that day. From what I could tell, I taught English composition classes at an online university. I loved to read and have dinner with friends. None of the information I found jogged more than a few random images of memory. I was beginning not to care anymore if I got those memories back. They’d be memories of people who were dead. And who knows, I might have even killed a few of them.

  I found my mother’s address on a birthday card she’d mailed me and decided that the following day, I would see the place where it had all happened. I didn’t want to, but I knew I had to.

  I found a bottle of wine in the kitchen. I wondered why looters hadn’t thought it was worth taking. The food in the fridge was rotted. I’d had to throw out everything. Most of the cabinets were bare except for my liquor one for some odd reason.

  I took the bottle and my scavenged food to the sofa where I wallowed in sorrow until a memory swam to the surface of my mind. I’d kept a journal nearly all of my life. Of course, most of the newer stuff was on the computer that I couldn’t access, but I had actual journals somewhere.

  More than a little tipsy, I stumbled to the bedroom and began searching for hiding places. The notebooks were where a sober person would have automatically assumed they were—in the back of my bedroom closet.

  The plastic tote I drug out of the corner was full of journals dating back to the sixth grade. I dumped t
he tote onto the comforter, crawled into the middle of the bed, and began reading. I read until I was sober. I read until my eyes burned. I read until I fell asleep on top of the pile.

  I learned about birthday parties that my mom had done a fantastic job of making perfect despite our lack of funds. Mom had worked at different retail stores while she finished high school and throughout college. My grandparents offered little financial help when it came to raising me. They thought that providing us with a roof over our heads was enough, and I, to some extent, could see their point.

  I read about my first kiss with a boy a year older than me who had chapped lips and slobbered all over my face. I hadn’t wanted the boy to kiss me. My friends were experimenting, though, so I let him. I hadn’t enjoyed it.

  I discovered that I’d been ashamed that I was a bit heavier than most of my classmates. I didn’t appear to have any boyfriends or any other crushes. I did have wonderful friends, most of whom, judging by the photos in the albums, were still my friends.

  I hadn’t been a straight-A or even an A/B student in high school, but in college and graduate school, I’d maintained a 3.5 GPA. I don’t know if I loved my job, as the journals didn’t go that far. I’m not sure if I’d been in a steady relationship when the outbreak happened. I found no evidence of such.

  The journals told me that I hadn’t been happy when my mom started dating my step-father, Nate, but I quickly grew to like him and the way he loved my mom. The birth of my little sister had been the happiest moment of my life. I thought my parents spoiled her, but I didn’t appear to have ever been jealous of her.

  Eventually, my grandparents got over the fact that my mom had me at such an early age. I was never close to them, though. I didn’t think they hated me, and I didn’t hate them. We were just indifferent to each other. Nate’s parents took to me once I got over being a teenager, and they became the grandparents I needed.