Sarah Tries to Save the World (4 page)

Chapter 6

We head towards Zentyn when we woke up, which used to be an enormously large city (according to the size of it on the map, at least.) Well, there’s also the fact I visited it once and watched the news report on the situation there.

It promised to be a great scavenging location, due to the fact when the tsunamis threatened to hit, it was evacuated within hours and the evacuees left pretty much everything but absolute necessities behind. Of course, this included all those wonderful canned foods that we, as survivors of the natural disasters, etc., were forced to live upon.

It was a shorter trip than usual from Lynin City to Zentyn, and we each only have a few shifts of working and not working. That’s pleasant enough; what’s even nicer is that we have some fresh food to complement the ugly, brownish mush we often have to consume from cans. The mush looks bad enough, but the metallic taste is even worse.

Anyways, we arrived in Zentyn at what we found to be about an hour before twilight. Apparently, we had slept much longer than usual in Lynin City. Despite the risks of being caught by the zombies after losing track of our time, we still sent out a group.

Maria went with Ben and Lily, while Aria and I scout the other few buildings. Zentyn was actually, shockingly, barely wrecked at all. The buildings were in fairly decent shape (regardless of the tsunamis which were due to hit here, and they probably hit Joryn instead). With ease, we scrounged a good thirty cans- in one of the houses, we found ten all stashed away in a ‘hidden’ compartment!

The time passes quickly as we carry armfuls upon armfuls of cans from houses to base, gradually wandering further and further away from our base. Unbeknownst to us, the bright sun is slowly disappearing from the horizon, leaving shadows around every small corner and darkness in those places which sunlight barely perpetrated anyways. We are oblivious as we happily gathered more and more food, and I smile to watch Maria skipping along the gradually darkening streets.

We are caught on our farthest trip away from the base when the sun finally set. I glance up a second after the sun must’ve set and panicked. Ben follows my gaze and, with one of the quick reactions he’s famous for in her group, bellows, “Drop your food! Grab your weapons!”

He thrusts a small dagger into Maria’s hand and, realizing I am still immobilized, slaps me in the face to alert me.

“We are about to face who-knows-how-many zombies. GET. A. GRIP.”

I’m livid for a few seconds, wanting nothing other than to scream my head off, before calming down. “Thanks.”

But those few seconds of precious time are slipping through my fingers, and with every ticking second the zombies are probably invading the city even further. We’re all sprinting towards the base, and only make it about half of the way to the base when the zombies finally reach the center of the city.

They began throwing themselves at us mercilessly, scrabbling over everything to reach us and hitting everywhere, everything, and everyone they can with their crude weapons to try to damage us (and accidentally slaying a few of their own).

The air is thick with fog, and an onslaught of zombies attacks each of us. I feel a moment of panic and fear for my friends before snapping back into warrior mode. I fought for my life, wildly spinning around when I could to make sure my friends were safe.

I mindlessly attack the zombies swarming me, edging my way closer to the base whenever possible. Aria and Lily are holding their own coolly and methodically (but not quite holding their own well enough to help the rest of us), but Ben struggles to protect both Maria and himself from the murderous zombies.

I begin to realize that there’s no way we can make it into our base without zombies following us in, and zombies in a tunnel would probably make the tunnel collapse. I’m desperately searching all around, looking for somewhere, anywhere, where the zombies couldn’t follow us.

My eyes lock onto a lone tower, with a ladder perilous for humans and probably downright stupid for zombies to climb. I point at the tower when I have a brief reprieve from fighting, and I know Ben and the rest of them realize what my idea is by the way a grim determination comes into their eyes and they try to walk towards the tower whenever possible.

It seems like hours, though in actuality only forty-five minutes, till we reach the water tower. I’m the first one to hoist myself up into the tower by a combination of perseverance, nimbleness, speed, and a little bit of luck.

Then I’m paralyzed by fear, watching as Aria climbs the tower too but praying that the remaining three fighting can make it up.

A few zombies try to climb the ladder, but Aria shoots them down with a small revolver with some incredible accuracy. All I can think of is the safety of those remaining on the ground.

Lily, too, climbs the tower, but Ben is hindered by having to protect Maria. He tries valiantly, but a few zombies get at Maria and strike quick blows on her head, knocking her out immediately. Another three zombies hit her side, opening a ginormous gash. My heart plummets to my feet as Maria falls to the ground and Ben slings her body over his shoulders.

He carefully begins maneuvering himself up the ladder, and I stifle a cry at the sight of both him and Maria. The gash in Maria’s side is oozing blood, and the pallor of her face convinces me that she needs help quickly. Ben finally struggles his way up the ladder, and I watch as he hoists both himself and Maria up onto the platform.

He tenderly takes Maria, who is limp and almost completely, dreadfully still, and lays her on the platform. Lily is firing shot after shot onto each of the zombies that try to climb the tower, while I try to stop the blood pouring endlessly out of Maria’s side.

I’m only attentive to her needs, listening to her feeble breaths with a terror festering and growing in my mind. I barely notice as the tears brim over my eyes and she struggles to push herself into a sitting position.

I know she knows that any efforts to save her are futile, but hasn’t accepted it. Again, her eyes seek to find mine, and she moves herself painfully slowly to wipe away some of the tears that are rapidly coursing down my face.

“Don’t cry,” she whispers imploringly to me. “Just laugh, forever and always.”

Her face turns whiter and whiter as she says quietly to me, “Hold my hand.”

I grasp her hand, looking into her tearless eyes with a grief unable to placed into words. She squeezes my hand.

“I’m leaving now, S-Sarah. J-just d-don’t l-look away!” Her eyes look at mine even more imploringly than before.

I look at her again, squeezing her hand back. “Don’t be scared, Maria.”

She whispers, “I’m not.”

She takes one more deep breath. I keep looking at her till the end, when the hand that had been squeezing my hand grows limp, and her blue eyes see nothing anymore. Then I press her hand to my lips, before the tears come out in deep sobs I can’t stop from choking out of me.

I cry for all the things that might’ve been with her, for a beautiful life ended, and although eventually all the tears have dried up, an unutterable grief still remains. I sit vigil with her body quietly after that. Night ends, day begins, and all I can do is stare back in her now empty eyes.

I close her eyelids gently before I finally force myself to stand up. Her frail body looks vulnerable in death, and I carry it down to the ground gently and dig a grave for her. My tears mingle with the earth after I bury her.

I watch the sunrise the next morning, knowing she would’ve loved it. My eyes wander over the glorious sunset and I realize that, although she was cruelly robbed of life, I must instead remember the wonderful time she spent with us and know that it is not an end for her, but a beginning of something which people on Earth can only catch a glimmer of. It is mysterious and so immeasurably massive that not even the wisest man on Earth could fully comprehend it till their passing on.

I leave fifteen minutes later with a sense of finality, not letting myself dwell on what lay behind but forcing myself to look forward.

Chapter 7

We decide to head towards Butioret, an enormous city that Ben says will definitely have some food left over to scrounge from. Instead of the sobbing, noisy grief I endured last time, I just feel an emptiness in me that I can’t fill. It threatens to consume me, and I feel removed from life as though no one else was there.

Again, I endlessly dig until there’s an entire layer of dirt under and over my nails almost thicker than my nails themselves. It takes us three tedious days to reach Butioret, during which time plods along slower than I ever remember it going. I feel gentle pats on my back, hear meaningless sweet nothings, and other forms of ‘encouragement’ during them, but the hollowness in my stomach is still there.

When we reach Butioret and emerge onto the surface, I calm my mind and go through the motions of looking for food as usual, with all four of us searching together in a big group, not even feeling relieved when we gather the biggest haul of food we’ve ever gotten in a single place.

Then we come to a locked up warehouse, large and seemingly weak, but when I try to break open the door with Ben, I feel a searing pain through my leg and the door hasn’t even budged.

Lily gasps, and I look at her, mystified. In response, she raises her arm and points at a symbol painted on the door. The same one we saw in Perlin City. The insignia Lily’s dad had on his lapel, according to Lily at least.

We spread out, feeling along the sides of the warehouse before realizing it was futile, grabbing one of our precious grenades, and setting it off by a spot Lily swears has got to be the correct one.

The door blasts open, and when the smoke clears from the air, we walk in with our guns at the ready. It holds billions upon billions of chairs, all with monitors beside them, and a giant projector near a plasma screen. I carefully examine the chairs, but the only thing noteworthy about them is that there appears to be broken restraining belts attached to each one of them. The monitors beside them are blank and broken too, or I’d fire them up.

However, the projector isn’t broken, and the four of us all walk up to it. More accurately, I walk up to it, and the other three are more focused on the plasma screen. I see the strange insignia on the projector again, and when Lily’s hand brushes against the plasma screen, the projector fires up and a video begins playing.

The four of us wordlessly watch, stunned, as a woman comes onto the screen, looking directly at the camera with a completely blank expression plastered on her face. This gives me the illusion she’s looking directly at me.. Then she begins to talk.

“Hello. My name is Penelope Whitman. I am the director of operation DEK. If you are hearing this, it is because something has gone horribly wrong with our experiment and I am, most likely, not alive anymore. There is a paper hidden in a warehouse in Perlin City that I would like for you to get to the government capitol if at all possible. It could contain the-”

She stops talking, and I can tell from the guilty look on her face that she almost gave away something.

“Our experiment involves super-human abilities; however, we are having a few difficulties currently, and would like for others to continue our work if something happened.”

A sudden urgency comes into her voice.

“Now go, because if something’s wrong with our experiment, you are in danger if you are within even one hundred miles of here. Remember your new mission.”

The monitor shut itself off, and we quickly vacate the building as instructed, each mulling over what she said in our own thoughts.

I panic when I realize that the sun has begun to sneak down on us like it did when Zentyn. But it’s too late; swarms of zombies are all around us, hundreds of thousands, three times as many there were in Zentyn.

We try to steel ourselves, but I can tell that the line of zombies continue as far as I can see and realize it’s futile to fight. I fight like a whirlwind, and by the brief glances I catch of my friends, we all seem to be holding our own. That’s until thirty target each of us at once, jumping on us and clawing at us like crazy. Ten of them are pulling on my legs, trying to make me fall, and the remaining twenty are clubbing at my head with blunt metal tools to try to either knock me unconscious or kill me.

I see Lily and Aria fighting back to back but struggling to stop the zombies, and Ben’s about to disappear under a wave of zombies. I gasp as everything disappears and I’m covered in darkness, with weapons hitting all over me and confusion all around of me.

Suddenly there’s a loud burst of what I know, even in my half-smothered state, to be machine gun fire.

There’s a sudden din, made of gunshots and grenades, and I vaguely wonder how Ben and everyone grabbed grenades, as we only took two with us. A zombie begins throttling me around the neck, and I stop focusing on anything at all but breathing. The zombie squeezes harder and harder and I reel from lack of air, trying with every ounce of strength left in my body to knock it off.

Darkness begins appearing in front of my eyes when my supply of air runs dangerously low, and I gasp for more air.

The darkness threatens to take over me, and I shut my eyes tightly. There are more shouts and gunshots ringing through my darkness, and the zombie lets go the next second.

I know only that I’m mercifully, wonderfully free, but my throat makes a bizarre sound as I take my first breath in forever. I see strange men running all around me, staving off the zombies, and then Ben and Lily and Aria running towards me.

I try to stand up, but there’s a ringing sound in my ears and I fall again. Ben catches me just in time, and I get one glimpse into his suddenly-frantic blue eyes before I don’t see anything at all.