Resurrection: A Zombie Novel by - (i love reading books TXT) 📖

road were running now too. We weren’t going in two directions anymore. We were all running in a single direction. South. Away from the screams.” Carol paused, then continued. “It was those things. Hundreds of them. Maybe thousands. A whole army of them pouring out of Olympia.”

Annie could only imagine how terrifying that must have been. No wonder Carol was such a disaster.

An army of those things. Pouring out of Olympia.

Where her sister Jenny lived.

“I ran down the middle of the road,” Carol said, “where it was a little less crowded. There were cars, but less people. That’s when I saw Hughes. He was on the other side. I ran over to him because he looked like the kind of man who might protect me. You know? And he did. I might have thought he was scary if I saw him at night out by myself, but a big guy like him was exactly what I needed right then. So I ran up to him and grabbed his arm like it was a saving banister. He let me. As if what I’d just done was the most natural thing in the world. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘We should get in one of these trucks and get down.’ So we did. We found an unlocked SUV with tinted windows and we got inside and locked the doors. He got on the floor in the back and I crouched down in the front.”

“Sounds like a good idea,” Annie said. “Lucky about those tinted windows, I guess.”

“It was a good idea. It’s the only reason I’m still alive. But that’s when it got really bad.”

Carol stopped talking. Annie wasn’t sure if she had paused or if she didn’t want to continue. Annie wasn’t going to ask. She didn’t want to push it. If Carol owned a restaurant in a prestigious part of Portland, she must normally be a competent and capable person, but now she was shattered. Like everyone else.

“I couldn’t see anything,” Carol said. “I didn’t dare sit up to look out the windows. It didn’t matter that they were tinted. Tinted windows aren’t like one-way glass, you know. You can sort of see through them. I didn’t want anyone or anything to see any movement inside. But mostly I didn’t want to see anything outside. And it’s probably a good thing I didn’t because if I could have seen what I was hearing, I wouldn’t have made it.”

Carol stopped talking again and Annie said nothing. Carol would either tell her the rest or she wouldn’t.

The silence felt a little bit awkward. Annie wanted to press Carol for more, but she didn’t. Finally, Carol finished her story unprompted.

“The screaming kept getting louder. Those things were screaming and so were the people. First people were screaming in terror and then were screaming in pain. They were being eaten alive, Annie. It was happening right outside the truck. They were being slammed against the side of it. There was this constant banging. The side window above my head cracked. I thought those things knew we were in there and were trying to bust their way in.”

Annie shuddered. She was not going to ask what she saw when she and Hughes finally climbed out of the truck. Surely Carol would never forget it, but also she might never want to discuss it. She reached toward Carol, found her hand, and clasped it.

They lay like that for a while, two new friends holding hands in the darkness. It felt good. Annie felt better than she had all day. She even forgot, for a moment, that she was being held hostage by Roland and Lane.

But Roland and Lane seemed like the least of her problems after hearing Carol’s terrible road story. She couldn’t get those images out of her mind.

Carol eventually let her hand go. Annie could hear her trying to get comfortable on the floor. It was impossible, but they both had to try.

Annie missed home so much that she ached. She wanted nothing more than to return to South Carolina even if it was a smoldering ruin. People breathe differently, more deeply, when they’re in the place where they come from. Annie breathed differently in South Carolina. She breathed differently in the whole American South, not just in South Carolina. The South was home. She didn’t like everything about it, but it was the place that raised her. It fit like a dress made just for her. The Northwest felt a little bit off, and a little bit foreign, even before all this happened. Not because there was anything objectively wrong with the Northwest, but because it wasn’t home.

Maybe things weren’t as bad in South Carolina. The virus came from Russia—that’s what Kyle told her, anyway—and it entered the United States in Seattle. So maybe the eastern part of America had more time to prepare. Maybe there were more survivors out there. The government might still even function. It was possible, right? She couldn’t really see how, but she had to believe it was possible.

Annie finally drifted off into a frightening dream world.

She ran down Fifth Avenue in downtown Seattle alongside hundreds of other people with the sound of screams, gunshots, explosions, and sirens behind her. Cars crashed into each other ahead of her. People jumped out of windows and onto the street. Some of them jumped from so high, they were instantly killed when they landed.

She woke up gasping and sweating and felt Carol’s reassuring hand on her shoulder.

“It’s okay,” Carol said. “You were just having a dream.”

When Annie finally fell back asleep, she fled a pack of the infected through a forest.