Page 4

The tea helps a little bit. As the pain eases, I find my mind uncontrollably slipping into the past, to things I’d rather not remember. But the memories are there, as real as the skinbags roaming the streets outside, whether I like it or not. I can run and I can hide, but they’re still there.

"Daddy, can we go outside yet?"

I looked down and Danny was giving me his best puppy dog look and swaying to and fro, his hands tucked in between his legs with his knees bent, with the kind of barely contained exuberance that only a child has.

I was sick of being asked this question. If I had a drop of water for every time Danny or Sasha had asked me, I could have outfitted us with water to last a month, and given us all baths too. Instead, it is the lack of water that pushed me to the top of the basement steps where I was peering out.

"Go downstairs!" I whisper-yelled in a harsh voice. "Or else!"

Danny was not much impressed by my threat. We’d spent the past thirteen days in the basement together, all four of us trapped just waiting out the insanity. By now, the radio had been off the air for over a week. Occasionally, we heard gunshots outside, but mostly just the grunting and chomping of the eaters as they roam the neighborhood. As near as I could tell, anyone uninfected was either dead or in hiding.

Danny didn’t like being yelled at, though. He’s the sensitive one. He trudged down the staircase looking downcast, and I had to remind myself that I was sending him away for his protection.

I peered out the peephole I’d drilled into the basement door and surveyed my kitchen. It looked safe, unmolested. As far as I knew, the eaters had not yet ransacked our house. And it would be hard to miss if they did. A raging z-monster is anything but stealthy.

Or, at least, that’s how things were two weeks ago when we locked ourselves in, barricading ourselves into the basement after we heard reports on the radio of eaters climbing through windows to get at people. And after I’d seen Ed Walters from two doors down, infected and feverish, wandering across my lawn in search of something to eat.

So we’d locked ourselves in with food and water and a hand-crank radio, which was all fine and good until the radio station also went dead three days later, replaced only by the emergency broadcast beacon. It’s been nothing but that mind-rending grinding over the air from then on. And now we were running out of water so I needed to venture out to find some. The pressure in the pipes had gone out the day after the radio, nine days ago. No doubt the city water pumping system had collapsed. The water I’d saved in the tubs and buckets had gotten us to this point, but now we were bone dry. I didn’t know where I was going to get water from. Even if I found a source, all I had to bring it back was some milk jugs and a picnic cooler. But it was pretty much do or die at this point.

I waved to Helen, who was at the bottom of the stairs with Danny and Sasha cuddled up between her legs. I cracked open the door and stepped out into our first floor, jugs and cooler trailing behind. "Lock it behind me," I said, as if Helen needed the reminder. As soon as I shut the door, I heard her rush quickly up the stairs to slam the deadbolt home. Then, just as quickly, I heard the patter of her feet back down the stairs to the relative safety underground.

First stop – the kitchen knives.

The house was clear, and after fifteen minutes of watching the neighborhood surreptitiously from the front window and seeing no movement in the street, I ventured knife in hand in to the garage.

I was certain I was going to find someone. I had that prickly feeling you get – a premonition or a gut sense or whatever – that some evil was about to befall me. It was like I could almost hear the suspenseful music playing in the background as I fell right into the trap, armed only with a butcher’s knife, surely an inadequate weapon against one of them. Or maybe it would just be an innocent person hiding for shelter, under the car or in one of the cars … or hiding behind the sports equipment … but in the heat of the moment as I surprised them they would fire their small holdout revolver, the little .38 they had picked up from grandpa’s dresser drawer. And I would bleed out there in my garage, surviving the zombie apocalypse only to die in the same pedestrian manner I could have been killed any day of the week on the subway coming home from work.

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