Shudder (Stitch Trilogy, Book 2) (9 page)

Isaac considered what Alessa was
saying, but he still couldn’t imagine how this had anything to do
with the creatures. He frankly didn’t know what to do with this
information.

“
Well, you’re feeling
better now, right?”

Alessa nodded.

“
That’s what matters,
then. It’s over, for now at least.”

Alessa didn’t seem totally satisfied
by that response, but Isaac just didn’t know what else to say.
After a time she sighed and laid her head on his
shoulder.

“
Tell me what it was
like,” she said, “for you and Joe, when you came to Paragon. And
during the outbreak. I meant to ask you earlier, before the things
came after us.”

Isaac thought back to life before
Paragon. It’d been almost a decade since the virus had torn his
world to pieces.

“
I was 16 when we first
started hearing reports of the virus. At the beginning, they seemed
like isolated incidents, but the symptoms were so… gruesome… that
it made the news, just for the shock value. It was clear from the
outset that this wasn’t just another strain of the flu or
something. People were bleeding from the eyes and nose, coughing up
chunks of flesh, their skin mottled with those big black bruises.
Just wasting away from the inside out in a matter of days. It was…
horrifying.”

Alessa nodded – Isaac was sure she
remembered this from her own experience. He continued.

“
And then when it started
popping up all over and they declared a state of emergency and
instructed everyone to stay home, that’s when it really set in that
this might be more than just a story on the news. They’d identified
it as some sort of mutated plague, right?”

“
Yeah. But they still
couldn’t find any way to treat it, so they were encouraging people
to stay
away
from
the hospitals so it didn’t spread.”

“
Right, I remember my mom
saying that. Anyway, we stayed in our apartment like instructed,
and it was so weird to all of a sudden be spending all day every
day with our parents like that. We fought, a
lot
. Joe and I had gotten used to
being left on our own – Joe was finishing his last year of high
school, and I missed meeting up with friends after school every
day, and neither of us could stand being cooped up in the apartment
24/7. But they wouldn’t let us leave.”

“
My parents wouldn’t
either. I wanted to kill them at the time, but I guess they were
just trying to protect us. I didn’t realize then how serious the
virus was, how widespread it’d become. How deadly.”

“
Yeah,” Isaac concurred.
“There was so much mystery surrounding the whole outbreak – it was
really unclear to me how it’d gotten started, what we could
even
do
to stay
safe.”

“
They still don’t really
know,” Alessa added. “I heard speculation that our enemies in the
Eastern Allies had released it as a biological attack, but that
didn’t seem likely to me, given how quickly their countries became
infected as well.”

“
My dad thought it must
have been some kind of mistake at a lab.”

“
That could
be.”

Isaac sighed. “So anyway, my parents
had wised up after that food shortage a few years earlier at the
start of the war, and they’d been stockpiling whatever they could
since then in case we ever hit a shortage again, with the wars
still going on. Of course, it wasn’t much – things were always
tight for us – but we were in better shape than a lot of our
neighbors.”

Alessa nodded. “My mom had
had some kind of intuition and went out and just bought a
ton
of stuff right when
the first reports of the virus came out. ‘Just in case!’ she’d said
and we all thought she was nuts at the time, but in a few months,
boy were we glad she’d done it.”

“
I couldn’t believe how
crazy people got. I saw someone get
shot
outside our window one day – he
was just pushing a grocery cart full of supplies, minding his own
business, and then boom – he was dead. They ran off with his stuff
and just left his body there to rot.” Isaac shook his head. “We
boarded up the windows after that. Luckily our building was run off
solar generators, so electricity and water weren’t an
issue.”

“
Oh really? We lost power
after a few weeks, but it wasn’t so bad. It was summer at least, so
we didn’t have to worry about the cold.” At that, Alessa shivered
and burrowed deeper into the blanket. “So when did you guys decide
to head to the quarantine zone?”

Isaac’s eyes darkened –
this was the most painful part of the story for him. “We ran out of
food after a few months. I kept trying to eat less, to leave more
for my family, to make it last, but I couldn’t do it. I was
so
hungry
all
of the time. My
parents did the best they could, but it wasn’t enough to sustain us
long-term. So finally one day my dad went out to scavenge, and he
came back with a cough.”

Alessa squeezed his fingers
supportively as Isaac wiped his eyes with the back of his
hand.

“
We did everything we
could, but the virus just took him.” His voice cracked. “It was
only a matter of hours before my mom came down with a fever.” He
closed his eyes and dropped his head against the wall, pushing the
image of his dying mother from his mind. “And then she was gone,
and it was just Joe and me. I don’t even know how we managed not to
get sick. Lucky, I guess. If you can call any of this lucky.” He
looked at Alessa with a shrug.

She wrapped her other hand around his
now too, cradling it in between both of hers. “How did you guys do
it? You and Joe, on your own?”

Isaac shrugged again. “By that point
they’d been talking about the quarantine zone on the radio for a
few weeks. We still had internet access, so Joe went to some local
forums looking for other survivors who planned to make the trip. He
found a group, packed up our stuff, and we went – there was nothing
left for us at home.”

“
I can’t imagine doing
that by yourselves. It must have been so hard for you
guys.”

“
I was –” Isaac shook his
head. “I was just grief-stricken. I couldn’t function. Our parents
were dead, our lives were over, I just couldn’t deal with it. But
Joe sucked it up and made sure we would be okay, like he always
did.”

Alessa turned away slightly, but Isaac
could still see the tears dripping down her cheeks. He knew Joe had
been Alessa’s rock as well – they’d both needed him.

“
So we just piled on a bus
with this group of strangers and somehow we made it there. A few
people fell sick along the way, and we had a couple close calls
with thugs and that sort of thing, but eventually it all worked out
and we pulled up to the gates.”

Isaac fell silent for a moment,
remembering his first days at the compound, and Alessa shared her
own experience.

“
I think I’ve told you
that my family all left together for Paragon, or what would become
Paragon anyway,” she said. “But somewhere along the way my brother
caught the virus, and then my parents, too. They’d
just
started showing
symptoms maybe a day or two before we reached the gates. Our car
even broke down about 10 miles outside the compound, and they found
the strength to walk all that way. We really thought they would
pull through, that if we could just
make
it
to the compound, that they would have a
secret cure or something that they’d been saving, just for those of
us who were strong enough to get there.”

Alessa choked back a sob and took a
deep breath. “But they didn’t – they didn’t have anything. And then
after we’d come all that way, they wouldn’t even let them in.”
Alessa buried her face in her hands for a moment,
sniffling.

“
My mom insisted that
Janie and I go on, since we hadn’t tested positive for the disease.
She still seemed to think there was a chance they’d somehow,
miraculously, make it. Or maybe that’s just what she told us, to
make sure we went on without them.” Alessa shook her head. “Either
way, we never saw any of them again.”

“
When did you first meet
Joe?” Isaac asked.

“
When they assigned us an
efficiency unit. The first few days, we were in this refugee
building, basically a sorting center where they were cataloguing
everyone who’d come in and finding a place for them to
live.”

Isaac remembered – long rows of cots
in a big open room, sounds of muffled crying from every other bed
once the lights went out at night. It hadn’t been an easy
adjustment for anyone.

“
We finally got our
assignment and went off to find our building, and that same night I
met Joe while wandering the halls looking for a less-crowded
bathroom.”

Isaac laughed. “Ah, yes. Joe had spent
our first few weeks there scoping out the best spots in the
building. There wasn’t much else to do at first.”

“
No, not until they
started giving out the work assignments a couple weeks later. Then
all of a sudden there was a little
too
much to do.”

Isaac remembered feeling relieved when
he was finally assigned to menial labor, working with the crews
completing the walls around the compound – at least it was
something to keep his mind off everything that had
happened.

“
So then Janie and I just
settled in, starting rebuilding our lives like everyone else, and
Joe and I got to know each other. He was…” she looked a little
wistful, “the best friend I had, besides Janie. It would have been
a lot harder without him.”

“
They closed the gates a
few months after we got there, right?”

“
Yeah, I think so. That
was after we’d stopped receiving radio and internet broadcasts from
outside,” Alessa recalled.

“
Were there other
quarantine zones?”

“
You know, ours is the
only one I ever remember hearing about. I could be wrong, though –
it’s not like anything I heard really sunk in that year after the
outbreak. Maybe they just had different messages on the radio or
whatever depending on your region, so we only ever heard about
ours. But I would imagine that other countries at least would have
had them.”

It was funny, but Isaac couldn’t
remember hearing about any other quarantine zones, either. That
seemed a little odd to him, but maybe he just didn’t remember like
Alessa said.

“
You think there’s anyone
left out there, Less?”

Alessa sighed. “I don’t know, Isaac. I
can’t imagine that there’s not. But then again, I couldn’t have
imagined any of this ever happening, so maybe I’m not the best
person to ask.”

She leaned her head against his
shoulder once more, and Isaac reached with his opposite hand to run
his fingers through her hair. They stayed that way for a while,
each lost in their own thoughts.

Before long Alessa’s breathing had
ebbed to the rhythmic cadence of sleep. Isaac switched off the
lantern and closed his eyes, saying goodbye at last to this taxing
day.

The next morning, Isaac and Alessa
woke early, the morning sunlight coaxing them from their cramped
little sanctuary.

Isaac pressed upward on the mangled
lid of the dumpster, carefully checking the surrounding lot for any
sign of intruders. The coast clear, he reached his hands through
the gap and unfastened the lock.

Throwing the dumpster open, Isaac
stood tall and stretched his limbs, relieved to breathe the air of
a fresh new day. He hadn’t realized how stuffy it’d become in that
noxious garbage bin. Springing over the side of the dumpster, Isaac
steeled his footing and offered a hand to Alessa as she swung her
legs gracefully to the ground, slipping her pack over her
shoulders.

They scanned the tree line for any
signs of yesterday’s visitors, but all was clear.

“
Should we check to see if
there are any supplies left in the mini mart?” Alessa
asked.

“
Good idea,” Isaac agreed,
following a few paces behind.

As his footsteps crunched once again
on the broken glass, Isaac thought of something – maybe the
creatures had left tracks?

The blacktop was devoid of snow, but
the grassy areas leading towards the surrounding forest still had a
dusting of white, and Isaac knew that whatever was following them
had come from the woods.

“
Less, I’ll catch up with
you in a minute. I want to check something out.”

“
Okay, love, I’ll be right
here if you need me,” she replied, stepping through the remains of
a large window.

Isaac continued past the convenience
store heading for the edge of the pavement.

What he found there stopped him in his
tracks.

“
Alessa,” he
called.

She poked her head out, “What is it,
babe?”

“
Come here.”

She stuffed something in her open bag
and jogged over, pulling up at his side. Isaac just pointed at the
imprints he’d found in the remnants of snow, unable to form any
other explanation.