Apocalypse Asunder Read online

  Jessica watched the zombie hit the beautiful wood floor, then glanced behind herself quickly. The rest of the hallway was quiet and empty; all the other doors were closed, and nothing was coming up the stairs.

  “Good shot.” Austin said.

  “You too.” she replied, her voice far more calm than she really felt. Her heart was hammering away in her chest, and she forced herself to take a long, slow breath as she gripped the shiny steel pistol in both hands and studied the doorway.

  “I think—”

  “—we should find another house.” Jessica finished for him. “Right there with you.” The bedroom was decorated in pastels and had Disney posters on the wall. Two of the skulls she could see inside on the floor were very small.

  There was no way she was sleeping in this house, and she sure as hell wasn’t bringing Candice inside either. It didn’t matter whether the rest of the rooms were clear or not . . . even out here in the middle Georgia sticks there wasn’t a lack of empty houses to choose from for shelter. They could find one that hadn’t hosted this level of horror.

  “I’ll lead the way down. You cover behind us.” Austin said, moving past her, heading for the stairs. Jessica nodded, knowing he couldn’t manage the stairs and twist to look to the rear at the same time. Not without pain that meant he’d be undoing days of healing. She backed from the door, still pointing the gun at it, then followed Austin downstairs.

  The SUV was right where they’d left it, engine idling calmly. Jessica looked around, but the yard was still empty and quiet. The vehicle’s window tint kept her from seeing Candice, but when she opened the door she saw the girl was pressed right up against the rear passenger window.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “We’re both fine.” Jessica said levelly, far more calmly than she felt. She checked the safety on the pistol twice, then got in and closed the door.

  “What happened?”

  “Zombie problem. We’re leaving.” Jessica replied as she opened the center console’s storage compartment and pulled out her purse. Heaving it into her lap, she dug inside for the box of forty-five caliber bullets. Moving them up to the top of the bag, she ejected the magazine in the Taurus, then toggled the safety and racked the slide back to clear the live round in the chamber.

  “Oh.” Candice said in a disappointed tone as Jessica started reloading the partially empty magazine. “I wanted to maybe play on the swings some if we stayed.”

  “Sorry Candy Bear.”

  “It’s okay.” the girl said, her voice now colored with a more matter-of-fact tone. She was adapting to the living nightmare of their situation fairly well in some ways; better than Jessica herself. Candice seemed to not find the whole set of circumstances quite as surreal as her mother did.

  Jessica managed to finish fitting fresh bullets into the magazine before Austin was able to get around to the passenger side of the SUV and open the door. She slid the reloaded magazine back into the Taurus and made sure it was on safe before putting the gun into the holster. “You okay?” she asked him as he got in.

  “Tired.” he said.

  “We’ll find something else. Plenty of daylight left.”

  “That’s why we do this first thing in the morning when it’s time for a change.” he agreed as he closed the door behind himself.

  “I didn’t think one bullet could do what . . . happened in there. Even a forty-five.”

  Austin shook his head. “I put a burst in too, but your shot was on target.”

  “Oh. Good.”

  Jessica hit the button that locked all the doors, then shifted into reverse and backed up in a U-turn before driving around the house and heading for the road. Austin produced some loose nine millimeter rounds from his overall pockets and efficiently replaced the three he’d expended from the MP5’s magazine before she reached the pavement.

  “What was in there?” Candice asked.

  “Just a zombie. Don’t worry about it sweetie.” Jessica answered without turning. “Seatbelt.” Then she glanced at Austin briefly. “Glad you were there.”

  “You barely needed me.” he said easily, his tone light.

  “A little support never hurts.” Jessica said as the tires left the grass and she turned onto the road. Despite her casual words, she was still working to calm down. If she’d fallen, she might have been delayed in getting her shot off. Or she might have missed. Or both. The zombie could have gotten its hands on her. Worse, it could have gotten its teeth on her.

  One mistake was all it took. Too close; the whole encounter upstairs had been far too close for her comfort.

  He chuckled softly. “I’ll mention that the next time you sniff when I point out I was shot.”

  “Oh God.” she rolled her eyes, but the smile on her lips told the truth when she glanced across to him. “Thank you.” she mouthed silently when he met her gaze. He winked at her.

  “Austin, maybe you should go back to using the cane.” Candice put in, missing the silent exchange. “You were moving really slow when you got back to the car.”

  Austin barked a burst of laughter, then cut himself off and gripped at his ribs. Several had been cracked, and while they were far more along than the more serious bullet wounds, they were clearly still tender. “I’m tough girlie-girl, remember?”

  “I remember.” she was silent a few moments, then she giggled. “I think we should start writing down how many middle names you’ve got.”

  “There are a lot.” he agreed, turning carefully and winking at her.

  “Yup.”

  Chapter Two – Winter is Coming

  “Why am I wearing this jacket when I’ve got the blanket?”

  “Because you like to push the covers off in your sleep.” Jessica explained patiently as she made sure the jacket was zipped at least halfway closed. “And it’s already cold tonight.”

  “I’m warm.” Candice protested.

  “Once you lay there for a few minutes and stop moving you’ll cool down.”

  “But—”

  “Jacket stays on.” Jessica said firmly. “Humor me, okay?”

  “Fine.” Candice said, subsiding with surprising good grace considering the strength of her initial protests.

  Jessica smiled. “Okay, nosy kisses.”

  Candice giggled sleepily as Jessica leaned down to rub their noses together several times. The girl hugged Jessica’s neck, then rolled over on her side and snuggled into the pillows. Jessica draped the blanket into place over Candice’s shoulders and moved to the door of the big bedroom.

  There she paused with one hand on the knob, gazing at her daughter in the scattering of moonlight streaming in through the window as Candice finished getting comfortable and was still. Jessica knew the girl wouldn’t be fully beneath the blanket when her mother came to bed, but that was fine; the jacket would hold her until then. Jessica would tuck Candice back in a second time, before going to sleep herself. After a few moments, Jessica slipped out and closed the door softly behind her.

  Moving down the hallway, she reflexively checked the big bookcase she’d moved to block the top of the stairs. It was not a true barricade; if she could move it, then most anyone else could too. But it would slow anyone – or anything – trying to come up the stairs down; and moving it would make noise.

  The furniture itself would scrape and groan across the floor if it were shoved aside, but she’d also set a ‘noise trap’ as Austin called it; two little pyramids of drinking glasses stacked on the floor next to the bookcase in either of the directions it could be moved. If it was shoved aside, the glasses would fall, break, and make more noise.

  As usual, she hoped it would be enough. So far it had, but it only took one bad night for things to go terribly wrong.

  Forcing herself to shrug mentally, like everything was going to work out fine, she turned to the bedroom nearest the stairs. It was directly adjacent to the big one, and lit with a pair of candles. Austin was sitting on the bed, leaning back against some cushions propped up befo
re the headboard. He had the MP5 broken down neatly on a towel spread out next to him, with the contents of what he called his ‘travel gun kit’ at hand. As she entered, he was using a long handled wire brush to scrub the inside of the weapon’s barrel.

  “She asleep?”

  “She will be in a few minutes, I think.” Jessica nodded as she sat down in one of the chairs. The three of them still slept in the same bedroom, in the same bed since they’d never yet found a master bedroom that had twin beds; but she’d begun reestablishing a set routine for Candice after some cranky moments. And others where attention and attitude wavered, when she realized the girl was still growing and needed more sleep than her mother or Austin did.

  Letting Candice out of her sight had been a big decision for Jessica, especially when the girl was going to be unconscious; but they were on the second floor of an isolated house. It was secure. Candice was behind a closed door, and Jessica could see and hear the hallway from where she sat. It was that, or Jessica and Austin would keep the girl awake if they were in the same room with her when she was trying to sleep. Or both adults would have hours of sleepless boredom while they tried to keep quiet.

  Small steps. Everything these days was small steps.

  “You want me to clean your Taurus when I’m done with this?” he asked as he finished with the barrel and laid it aside.

  “You keep telling me I need to keep practicing everything, so I guess that means I’d better do it.”

  “I don’t mind.” he shrugged. “I mean, I know you know how to break the gun down and put it back together. That’s the important part, the hard part. The actual cleaning is easy.”

  “I won’t twist your arm to make you let me do it.” she said teasingly.

  “Good, because that would hurt.” he grinned.

  “Poor little tough guy.”

  “I was shot you know.”

  “I know.” she laughed. “I think I’m due for my every-three-hour thank you for that, so thank you.”

  “Three hours now? It used to be a lot more often than that.” he said as he used one of the greased cleaning rags to oil some little part of the submachine gun’s innards that she couldn’t name. The first time he’d broken the weapon down for cleaning, she’d been just short of goggle-eyed at how many bits and pieces were inside it.

  “So, I’ve been thinking.” she said, purposefully changing the subject, though she made sure to smile when he glanced up at her again.

  “One of my favorite things about you.”

  “Thinking?”

  “Yup.”

  “One of us needs to be doing the heavy lifting.”

  “That’s a little low, but I’ll take it as a joke.” he grinned. “Okay, let’s have it. What’s on your mind?”

  Jessica stretched her legs out and let herself slump in the chair into a disgraceful – though disgustingly comfortable – slouch. “October is half over.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Fall is well and truly underway. Temperatures are already down enough to be nippy at night, and even mid-afternoons are kind of cool these last few days.”

  “Yeah, I’d guess probably around seventy or so; and that’s with the sun soaking into everything all day.” Austin shrugged “Winter’s coming.”

  “Oooh, I miss that show.” she said, her expression twisting sorrowfully.

  Austin laughed. “The books are better.”

  “Well if we find a set, I’ll read them. It’s not like they’re going to keep making episodes with all this going on.”

  “Probably not. I’ll keep my eyes open.”

  “Thanks. I never had much time to read the past, oh, seventeen years or so. Barely had time to collapse into the bed or on the sofa after I got the kids into bed.” Her expression darkened further, but she shook her head briskly before he could offer a condolence. “Never mind. I’ve got time to read now, if we find any good books. Even moms need some R&R on occasion.”

  “But about winter . . .” he prompted her.

  “Oh, right.” she banished the memories of a life lost to the apocalypse and frowned thoughtfully. “Next month, we’ll be lucky if it’s in the upper fifties on some of the colder afternoons. And by December it could easily be down in the forties.”

  “It had occurred to me.” he admitted.

  “Well, Candice and I aren’t as built to withstand four or five months of weather that cold; especially not Candice. She’s not just ten, she’s also under a hundred pounds.”

  “You’re more than a hundred pounds.” he said with a wink.

  “Not much more.” she protested, though she managed a grin even as she felt herself blushing lightly. She’d always been reasonably slim, even after three children, but years as an office worker had left room where she felt she could improve a little. However, seven weeks of surviving a zombie apocalypse, constantly moving and scavenging for enough to eat and drink, had put her in the best shape she’d been in for years.

  “Don’t talk about my weight. Didn’t y– don’t ask a girl what she weighs.” Jessica continued, catching herself just in time. One of the standard subjects-to-avoid was talking about family. Especially the ones whose fates were unknown. Austin’s parents were in that category. If they were alive, they were somewhere in the mid-west.

  “You brought it up.” Austin pointed out. His voice was calm and normal, showing no sign he’d noticed where the thread of conversation had almost gone.

  “Shush.” she said, keeping her tone and manner light and teasing. “Candice doesn’t have the body mass to handle being cold all the time, and I’m not sure just bundling her up like an Eskimo is going to work. Not for three or four months straight. We need heat. This is Georgia. Fireplaces are rare – real ones that work anyway – and I doubt we’re going to find one on the second floor of a house we can take over for the winter.”

  The second floor was crucial. So far, zombies didn’t climb or fly. They could barely make it up stairs when something drew their attention to make the attempt. But they could batter through doors and windows if something motivated them to notice a reason to, and houses everywhere in America were festooned with plenty of ground-floor windows. Every one an open invitation for a wandering zombie to show up and help itself to dinner.

  “If we try hard enough, we might be able to rig something up.” Austin said. “Figure out a way to vent a makeshift stove or firepot or something and still keep the air clean.”

  “How?” Jessica wondered.

  “I don’t know. Appropriate some dryer ventilation tubing maybe. Get another barbecue grill, or a big wok.”

  “Do you know anything about metal working?”

  “I took shop, but it was wood shop, and it was back in high school.”

  “I might not be a doctor or nurse, but I worked in medical administration for over a decade.” Jessica sighed. “I know what carbon monoxide poisoning can do, and how fast it can take everyone in a building down without warning. If we get something like that wrong, when we’ve got a fire in the room with us, we could die in our sleep.”

  Austin started reassembling the MP5. “We’d need a lot of wood to keep it going anyway. Off the cuff, I’d guess we’d be looking at something like an hour or two of gathering and sawing a day. At least.”

  “On top of finding enough food and water, keeping the car fueled, cooking, dishes, clothes . . .” she nodded regretfully.

  “I thought about maybe trying to look around for a generator.” he said as he snapped and slotted metal back together into the shape of a gun. “That, plus an electric heater, and we’d just be down to having to fetch gas in.”

  “Same problem.” she said unhappily. “Less risk of poisoning the room air, but I remember the figures I ran back in Knoxville.”

  “Those were big generators.” he interrupted.

  “True, but even if we can find a small one around here somewhere, it’ll still go through gallons a day. A hundred and twenty days at even three gallons a day, which I doubt will be what we
really need, is approaching four hundred. That’s a lot of trips back and forth to a gas station.

  “Plus Isaac said something about how gas can go bad. Brett mentioned something about it too. I can’t explain it, but if that’s how it works, we could get into December or January and be stuck trying to keep the generator working with gas that won’t do the job anymore.

  “And even if neither of those are insurmountable problems, we’re still faced with the noise of running a generator all winter.”

  “It’ll attract zombies.”

  “Probably.” she agreed. “And if not zombies, then other survivors for sure. Anyone out and about who notices a working generator is almost certainly going to investigate. And they might not be in a merely curious mood when they get here either.”

  Austin nodded again. “All excellent points. So spill it.”

  She blinked at him. “What?”

  “I know you far too well by now. You’ve always got a plan.”

  Jessica felt her cheeks heating a little again. “You’re the one who knows what he’s doing.”

  “We’ve already had that conversation a bunch, and I won every time. You’re in charge.” he smiled as he fitted the last few pieces of the submachine gun into place. “And you don’t bring something like this up unless you’ve got an idea about how to resolve it. Not without starting the conversation with something like ‘give me an idea here’.”

  She shot him the finger, and his grin broadened. He finished with the MP5, loaded and safed it, then laid it next to him on the bed. “Come on Jessica, spill. We don’t want to rely on a generator, die in our sleep from carbon monoxide, spend the entire winter cutting and chopping wood, or draw a lot of attention; so what’s the plan?”

  “I think we should leave Georgia.”