“No,” Harlow sounded a little dejected. “Sorry.” She had gotten quieter, so I glanced over at her. She stared down at the ground and fiddled with her cross necklace. “I just wanted to talk so I wouldn"t have to think about everything that happened at the quarantine. I actually felt safe there, for the first time since before my mom died.”
I exhaled and guilt crept in. I was one of the very lucky few who still had a surviving family member. Max and I were orphans, but we had each other. The only thing Harlow had was… well, me.
“I"m sorry,” I softened. “I know how rough this is. I try not to think about any of it, ever.”
“I know. Me too.” Harlow kept fidgeting with her cross necklace, but she looked up as we walked. “It is weird what happened back there, right?”
“Weird is kind of a relative term,” I said. “It wasn"t that long ago when zombies would"ve been defined as weird.”
“Yeah,” Harlow smiled at that. “I meant the way they were all together. I"d never seen so many of them all at once. Usually it"s like five or maybe ten. There had to be hundreds back there, to take out that many soldiers.”
“There weren"t that many soldiers,” I said, deflecting the point she made. “There were only about fifty soldiers, and two hundred or so of us.”
“But they were working together,” Harlow pressed on. “Didn"t it seem that way? That the zombies had planned the attack?”
“Zombies can"t plan anything.” I shook my head. “If they were capable of rational thought, then they"d be people. The infection eats at their brain, stripping away all the things that make us human.”
“I know that"s what they told us,” Harlow said. “But how much do they really even know about the virus? It hasn"t even been a year since the outbreak started, and then once it started spreading, everything pretty much shut down. Nobody is an expert on it.”
“All I know is that if you shoot them, they die. If you get their blood or saliva in your blood or saliva, you die,” I said. “That"s all I need to know.”
“I just think this whole thing is weird,” she muttered.
“Yeah, this whole thing is weird,” I agreed. “Don"t try to make sense of it because you can"t. Everything is just really, really messed up.”
“If you really believe that, then why are you trying so hard to find your brother?” Harlow asked.
“Because. He"s my little brother. If the world is gonna end, I"d like to be with him.”
“And you don"t know where he is?”
“I"ll find him.” I was surprised by my own conviction, but I knew that I could. I"d made it through everything with him. Finding him at a government quarantine couldn"t be that hard.
We were somewhere in the desert in the South Western United States, but I didn"t know exactly where. Max and I lived in Iowa before all this happened, and then we started running.
We kept moving until Beck found us and shipped us out here.
City and state delineations didn"t matter as much as they used to. Everything was an abandoned waste land anyway.
When the sun started rising to my right, I knew I really was heading north. I tried to navigate by the night sky, but other than Orion, constellations remained a mystery to me.
If we ever found a city, I"d have to look for a compass. And maybe a map. As it was, I hadn"t seen any roads or signs. We were wandering blind in the desert, the sun was coming up, and we didn"t have any water.
We approached a hill, covered in dry brush and loose sand. I climbed up, my feet slipping on the ground, but Harlow lagged behind me.
“I"m tired,” Harlow had been quiet for a long time, and her voice pierced through the silence. It didn"t help that I was getting tired, too. “And thirsty.”
“If you see a drinking fountain and a bed, feel free to stop.”
“Can"t we take a break at least?” Harlow asked. “There aren"t any zombies around.”
“We"re not stopping until we find some place to stop at. We need to cover as much ground as we can during the daylight.”
Harlow opened her mouth to say something else, but I shushed her. I heard something.
I"d scrambled to the top of the hill and knelt down, so I was mostly hidden. I squinted and made out shapes on the horizon. It sounded like a death groan, but there was something else.
Almost like a grunt and a growl. I couldn"t place it, but I didn"t think it was zombie.
We could turn and go in the other direction and completely avoid them, and that might be the smart thing to do. But I didn"t want to veer off course. It would be hard enough for me to stay on course without any detours.
Besides, after watching everyone I know get killed by zombies last night, it might feel good taking some of them out.
Harlow had climbed up next to me. I showed her how to click off her safety, and I took out my shotgun. There were definitely zombies, I could see them, but something else made a strange guttural roar. It didn"t really make sense.
Then I finally put it together, and I stopped and stared.
– 3 –