Alive! Not Dead! (23 page)

I told myself that my affair with Rachel had simply been a bad dream – like the zombies in the snow.  It felt real, but it wasn’t.  Telling
myself that it was a dream was the only way I could convince myself that it never really happened.

We never set foot back in the lobby.

I never told Mindy about the affair.

We made a new plan to go to the Gulf whenever it warmed up.

BOOK TWO:  THE LOSS

RECOVERY

Donna Mattingsly struggled to get to her feet.  Her legs and back were numb and asleep.  She had been lying on the ground under a parked van for a very long time.

She finally was able to stand.  Steadying herself against the van, she brushed the dirt off of her legs and shirt.  She brushed back her long red curly hair with her dirty hands.

A very large group
of undead had just passed by.

She didn’t know how long she had been under the van.  It seemed like hours.

Her husband and 5 year old son hadn’t made it under the van in time.  They had been caught and consumed by the undead.  Their bodies were now lying in the middle of the road, gored.  Her son’s right arm was propped upward like he was still trying to fend off the undead even in death.  The rest of his body was unrecognizable.

Donna stood looking down at them.  She had no more tears to weep for them.  She had cried so much. 
Losing her mother, her father, all of her friends.  Losing people they had met on the road as they traveled away from Salt Lake City to Omaha.

Rumors were that the military had a secure base in Omaha.  She hoped that the military there was trustworthy; she heard that they had the whole base barricaded.  That’s where she and Steve were going. 
Steve her husband and Alex, her son.

“Not anymore, guys,” she whispered to their corpses.  “It’s just me now.”

She blinked away a tear which was fighting to get out of her eye.

Wind blew around her feet.  The highway was cluttered with hundreds of vehicles.

She was standing on the side of I-80 four miles west of York, Nebraska.

Suddenly she was tackled from behind.  It was a ro
ugh jar that cricked her neck.

“
Get down!”
some voice told her.  “
There’s more coming!”

“Fuck,” she whispered.  She quickly crawled back under the same van she had
been under before.

She looked around to see who had tackled her, but there wasn’t anyone around.  All of the crashed cars around her only had daylight under them.

Where did they go
? Donna wondered.

She heard slithering footsteps.  She quietly lay there again as another unending parade of undead
slowly marched past.

Mindy and I left Billings the following May.  Snow was still piled up on the grass in the city.  The roads had become slushy and passable.

We drove through the slush toward Cheyenne.  We avoided Denver - and the looming thoughts of Skin
-
by heading instead east on I-80 from Cheyenne.  The wind was cold against our bare faces as we rode our motorcycle. We were bundled up in several layers of coats.  The weather warmed up as we made our way out of the Rocky Mountains down into the rolling foothills of western Nebraska.

We didn’t see any people.  Ther
e weren’t any zombies, either.

We ate very little.  We rationed all of our food.  We had
Ziploc
sealed bags in a small cooler full of cut up meat tied down on the back of our motorcycle.  We also had a 24 pack of bottled water that we slowly sipped from.

We stayed at a
Super 8
on the east side of Kimball, Nebraska.  The second night we stayed there, Mindy was in the mood for some love.  During the middle of making love, she whispered “I love you Dan.”

“I love you too, Rach…
”

“What?”  She stopped.

“I love you too, Mindy.”

She climbed out from under me.  “You said
Rachel,”
she said, wide-eyed.  She grabbed part of the bed sheet.  She held it in front of her as she stood naked by the side of the bed.

I rolled onto my back, sighing.  “I
said
Mindy.”

“You’ve never said Rachel like
that
before!”

I couldn’t think of anything to say.  I honestly had been thinking about Rachel.

Mindy sat on the side of the bed, her back to me.  “Rachel’s dead.”

“I know.”

“Were you thinking about her or a different Rachel you knew?”

“Does it matter?” I asked.  “They’re all dead now anyway.”

“Yes it matters,” Mindy said, quickly looking over her shoulder at me.  “It matters a hell of a lot!”

“It was a different Rachel,” I said, lying.  “It was a girl I knew in Seattle.”

“Don’t I satisfy you any more, Dan?”

“Oh God, yes,” I said, sitting up on an elbow.  “You are the best I ever had.” 
Again, a lie.

She smiled turning toward me.  “You’re the best I ever had, too.”

I pulled her toward me.  She put her head on my chest.  I said “I’m sorry.  My mind was just wandering.”

“You’re tired,” she said.  “We’ve been on the road a long time.  Let’s take a couple more days break here.”

“Ok.” I said.

I didn’t sleep for a long time.  My mind kept playing Rachel over and over.  I kept seeing her red curly hair bouncing.  I kept seeing her tits bouncing.  I kept feeling her sucking my cock and I kept thinking about how we fucked like animals on the couch of the
hotel.

And I kept beating myself up for murdering her.

It was the humane thing to do
I told myself.

I neede
d to stop thinking about her.

She was dead.

She was gone.

Enough.

Back up the highway, we loote
d through a Dairy Queen.  There wasn’t anything other than dried melted ice cream in the bottoms of all the coolers.  All of the other food had gone bad.  The walk-in cooler near the back of the store had been jimmied open long ago.  There wasn’t anything inside that we would dare eat.

The rest of the shops on the highway didn’t bring any goodies, either.  We stared at a
hanging calendar behind a cashier in one shop.  The month on the calendar was August.

This nightmare had been going on for almost a year.

We stayed again that night in a different room in the Super 8.  Mindy and I made love, and even though I was thinking of Rachel the whole time, I dared not say her name.

This became our routine.  We would travel a few days, take a break for a day or two, and then move on.  The world around us was dead.  We didn’t see a single soul or find a morsel of food we could eat.  We made love every other night, and every other night I would bite my tongue when I said “I love you, Mindy” hoping beyond hope that
Rachel
wouldn’t slip out by mistake.

It was almost like Rachel was haunting my mind.

I couldn’t stop thinking about her!

Thanks for the knife in the back of the head, Dan,
I heard her saying.
  Nothing like getting stabbed in the back by the man who I thought cared for me.  Do you do that to all the girls you love? Is Mindy next? Are you going to stab her in the back of the head after you fuck her, too?

SHUT UP!
I screamed at her in my mind.

About 20 miles east of Grand Island, Nebraska we came across a major traffic jam.  There were cars on both sides of the highway as far as the eye could see.

“Wow,” Mindy muttered.  “What happened here?”

“Don’t know,” I said as I stopped the motorcycle.  I shut it off.

There was this sound…

It was a huge crackling thunder.  The sky was clear so it couldn’t have come from a thunderstorm.  It was enormously loud.  We looked around, trying to see anything anywhere, but we couldn’t see anything out of the norm.

It was a deep earth shattering crackle.  It almost sounded like the passing of a jet overhead, but it was deep with loud bass.  When it cracked and popped it made our clothes ripple on our bodies.

The passing of a jet?
I thought. 
That sounds just like when the plane crashed in the mountains in Seattle…so long ago…could it be related?

Then it was gone, echoing away over the
flatlands.

Mindy’s hands gripped my sides hard.  “Dan,” she whispered.  “Look!”

“What is it?”

“Zombies!
Oh my God, thousands of them!”

Down the hill ahead of us, the horizon was full of zombies.  They weren’t simply on the h
ighway, they were everywhere.  On the sides of the road.  In the fields.  Everywhere.

Quickly, I hopped off the motorcycle.  I told Mindy to get in the stalled car next to us.  There were no bodies in the car that I could see.  Mindy jumped into the passenger seat.  We made sure all of the windows were closed as we locked the doors.

We slid down in the seats, covering ourselves the best we could with our coats.

We waited.

They walked past us. 
Undead, decomposing, rotten.  They gargled, spit, and lunged as they walked.  They looked like they were tripping over themselves in their undeath.

Some were clothed.  Some were naked.  There were old and young, children.  Al
l of them had a bruise of some kind on their face or head.  Some had their hair torn out.  Some carried things like ripped limbs or branches. Some were covered in blood.  Others looked almost like a normal person, except their faces were emotionless and they walked with a dead stiffness as they prodded by.

What was driving them westward? Where did they all come from?

Did that loud crackling sound attract them? Had another nuke gone off? Was Moses Lake still active? Had Washburn launched something into the atmosphere that alerted all undead to congregate to it?

There were so many of them.

None of them noticed us at all.

We stayed hunkered down in the small car for a very long time.  My legs were cramping and I needed to move, but I wouldn’t dare.  For a while, Mindy fell asleep, her head resting on the passenger seat, her legs underneath her on the floorboards.

I watched her sleep as the undead marched past.

After a long time, the sun started to set.  The undead kept walking past.  When night fell, I could still hear them out there, shuffling, a grunt every now and then.  Sometimes one would bump against the side of the car, or even hit the back end, but they kept going around us like we weren’t even there.

I woke up at dawn the next morning.  There were no more zombies walking past us.  I dared a peek out the door.  It was clear.  I woke up Mindy.  We got back on the motorcycle after a quick beef breakfast.  We continued eastward, moving left and right through the jumble of stalled vehicles.

A few hours later, we were a few miles west of York, Nebraska.  There was a slight rise in the road ahead.  As we came up it, I noticed that another large group of zombies was approaching.

Mindy noticed the group, too.  I could tell because her grip on my hips tightened.

Then she said “Th
ere’s someone there! A lady!”

Some woman with long red curly hair was brushing off her legs.  My first thought was that she looked like Rachel.  I quickly put that thought aside.  The lady didn’t see the approaching zombies.

Mindy and I hopped off the motorcycle.  I ran ahead of Mindy a little bit.  The lady still hadn’t noticed the zombies.  Quickly I jumped, launching into the air tackling the lady.  I said loudly “
Get down! There’s more coming!”

“Fuck!” she whispered.

She had been standing right next to a van.  I jumped into the front seat and Mindy jumped into the passenger side again.  I looked for the redhead, but she wasn’t anywhere in sight.  I kept the door unlocked for a minute just in case she tried to get in, too.

Where did she go?

“She’s under the van!” Mindy said.  “I saw her go under!”

“Dammit!” I whispered as I locked the door.  The win
dow was rolled all the way up.

We hunkered down, waiting, as another wave of zombies slumbered by.

It was a very long time before this group had passed us.  I think it took almost a day and a half for them to finally dwindle off into the horizon.

With hunger raging in my stomach, I opened the van door to get out.

Looking under the van I saw that the redhead was asleep.

“Hey,” I said.  “You hungry?”

Mindy got out and ran over to my side.  She said “Hey. 
You alive?”

The lady stirred then slowly slid out from under the van.  She tried to stand but c
ouldn’t.  She reached for me.  I grabbed her arm to steady her.  “You ok?” I asked.

She shook her head slowly.  Her long curly red hair was full of dirt.  “Not really.”  She had deep lines in her skin.  Her eyes had dark circles under them.