Chapter Twenty-Four
Maisie
I know how to worry. I grew up surrounded by fear and trained to anticipate every possible disaster, every worst outcome. Born into Mom’s homespun religion whose fundamental belief was that if you kept your eyes wide open and hunting for every horror, they wouldn’t, couldn’t sneak up on you.
Well, that was a load of horseshit.
Nothing could have prepared me for this drive.
Stretches of silent, empty road, suddenly swarmed.
My pulse would finally begin to slow, then a body would hurl itself at my window.
A zombie bear bouncing off our plow. Over and over, the terrifying night dunks my brain in cortisol and adrenaline.
Everett hasn’t stopped trembling. Chicken sits alert in his lap, a low, guttural growl burbling in her throat without end.
The barren country roads weave through sparsely populated farmlands on the way to Gramps’s bunker.
We bypass small towns, steer clear of residential areas.
There are fewer undead here, but the ones we find are starving and horrible.
We pass one farm, and Chicken hisses, the ridge of fur along her back rising.
Then we see what she sensed, the blood-sprayed field.
The swarm eating the livestock, the livestock eating the swarm. Everett gags into his palm, turns away.
“I hate that I brought you here,” I whisper into our dark, cold car.
“There is nothing I wouldn’t experience to be by your side, Maisie,” he says into the quiet.
He holds my hand in brief interludes, just long enough to give a flash of comfort, but otherwise staying at the ready.
Each mile between West Point and the bunker takes off another year of my life, but finally we arrive at a dusty lane hidden in a copse of trees.
No marker, barely wide enough for a car, but the first set of coordinates leads here. It’s midnight on the dot.
“Is this it?” Everett asks as I slow to a stop, then turn gingerly in to the small gap between the trees. “This doesn’t seem like a place anyone could live.”
“That is the whole point.” I wince as low branches scrape against the windows and what’s left of my solar panels.
At least one was badly damaged during the escape from West Point, maybe more.
Will they charge my car again? It feels indulgent to worry about that now, when I don’t know what we’ll find at these coordinates.
If looters really did attack Gramps to steal his supplies, would they be here still?
Would they take him prisoner or beat him unconscious or worse?
We have Tasers. A machete in the floorboard.
A single revolver Everett’s mother thrust into my hands, then refused to take back.
“Protect yourself, and protect my son,” she’d said. “There are worse things than zombies out there, Maisie. Like the people who let this all happen.”
It was a somber thought, reminding me how GI-27 originated in a lab.
The accidental unmaking of our country, the death of millions, was all made possible by our government’s indifference to the costs of corporate greed.
A new wonder chemical, so effective at preserving food and drugs, they rushed it to market with no real studies of its impacts, so pleased that it could be done that no one bothered asking whether it should be.
No one except for Gemma, of course, who lost her job in the FDA for asking the questions our government didn’t really want answered.
Not when corporations were throwing money left and right to get their hands on the new compound.
The fact is, the capitalist machine has finally made America eat itself, turning us into a human Ouroboros straight out of one of Everett’s horror movies.
I’d shuddered, then shoved the gun into my belt. I vowed the day I found Mom sprawled on the dirt floor of our cellar that I’d never, ever own a gun, not until I could safely tell real danger from the fear of it, but I guess we don’t get to stand on all our promises in the middle of an apocalypse.
We decide to park a ways off and approach by foot. The forest is a thousand shades of black, the cold moonlight blocked by the thick canopy above. Our Tasers hum faintly in unison, Chicken perched on Everett’s shoulder as we walk softly, quickly, toward the break in the trees.
A truck’s visible ahead, its nose tilted deep into a gully.
“That’s not Gramps’s,” I whisper, then point to a van parked farther off in the trees beneath a tarp shelter. “That is.”
Everett’s eyes are hidden in shadows, but I hear the sharp intake of breath. “Bandits, then?”
I nod, then slowly slip the gun from my belt and switch my Taser to my left hand. I don’t know if I could shoot another living, breathing person, but if they’ve hurt Gramps, I think I just might.
I inhale deeply, hating how the cold grip of the gun warms against my palm. “Let’s get closer.”
We edge through the darkness toward the clearing, pausing to hide behind the truck’s bumper.
Inside the bed are all manner of food and supplies, probably looted from other households in the area.
Boxes of cereal, gas station honey buns, plastic cartons of milk.
I frown at the food chosen and am about to point it out to Everett when my foot connects with something solid on the ground.
I choke back a scream at the foot lying in the leaves. I peer around the truck. It’s still connected to its body, but the head is missing.
There was a fight, but who won? The truck still here, and a dead body lying beside it?
“There’s more, look,” Everett whispers, pointing down into the gully. Water streams over the blue, torn faces of men missing chunks of their skulls. Did Gramps win, then? Is he inside, hunkered down? Is he hurt? The metal hatch to his underground bunker glints in a stray beam of moonlight.
Chicken hops down to the ground, then hisses, arching her back. Leaves rustle wildly ahead, from the side, from behind.
A swarm.
There are too many to fight. Their eyes gleam, their hollow mouths open and rasping.
They are too fast, too hungry. The first one reaches me, and I tase it awkwardly with my left hand, the gun useless in my right.
It falls limp, its rotten fingers leaving streaks of rust-brown as they drag down my leg.
“The hatch!” I yell, not bothering to be quiet now.
We pelt the last ten feet toward the round cover and its exposed handle in the clearing.
Everett heaves it open, gestures me in, and I descend the dark internal stairs quickly, violently.
Everett brings the cover down over us just in time.
Groaning, scrabbling, skittering sounds above are muffled through the iron, then move on, stopping somewhere nearby, where they stay.
“The truck,” I whisper. “The food must’ve drawn them.”
Something clangs below. A gun being cocked? Or was that Chicken?
“Gramps!” I call. “It’s me, Maisie! Don’t shoot!”
I swallow. It occurs to me too late that it might be one of the bandits holed up down here for the night instead. Because if that was Gramps, he would’ve answered me.
I raise the gun.
There’s nothing for it. Until daylight, we’re stuck in here, and Gramps may be down there farther within, hurt and bleeding, prisoner in his own bunker.
There are two of us, and with three dead bodies outside, how many bandits could be left?
More than four wouldn’t fit in that truck.
I look at Everett and mouth, Be ready. And then, because I can, because I do, I love you.
I turn and pound down the rickety internal stairs, like the kind that would lead to a storm cellar, only at the bottom of this packed-dirt room is a metal door cracked open. I kick it wide, then burst into the small, dimly lit interior, Everett right behind me.
I lead with the gun, just like Mom taught me, swiveling to my right, front, and left. The place is a mess. Ransacked, dishes broken…
And empty.
I spin back around and see Everett, staring at the floor.
There’s blood. Dread tugs my guts downward, a dull, sickening sensation. Fresh footprints outlined in dark red. Ours, I realize. Our footprints.
But whose blood?
Beyond Everett, back in the dark stairwell, I see him. Lying beneath the steps, legs crumpled. Blood settled in a pool around him.
“Gramps!” I sob out.
I rush toward him, Everett crying out, “No! Stop! He could be dangerous!” behind me, but I can’t.
I can’t see anything but the way his boot tilts unnaturally toward the floor.
I fall to his side, crawling toward where he lies half in shadow beneath the stairs.
I follow the line of his small, thin legs upward.
Worn, cuffed denim that seems to go on forever, cinched inward around a narrow waist with an embroidered leather belt.
Flowers outlined in old, yellowed thread, splotched here and there with the color of browning fruit.
I see those flowers in my dreams, sometimes. I know their shape, each tiny stitched leaf.
Mom?
Everything smells of rot.
The thin red plaid shirt looks blue under here, and though my vision’s clouded with tears, I can still see the pearl snap buttons where they shine in the darkness over the sun-wrinkled chest. The small golden locket resting in the divot of her throat, sticky with blood.
I already know, without looking, what’s inside.
A baby’s thumbprint in faded india ink. I blink and shriek and run my hands over that chest, the once-soft cotton stiff where the blood’s begun to dry.
The trail of long, white-blond hair stuck to the floor. I scream.
It’s not Gramps at all.