Until the End (5 page)

Jordan is tireless. He rows us down the river with even strokes, cutting up the current. His shoulders roll with each pull, stretching the cotton of his shirt over his back. His arms flex and strain against the sleeves and I feel my hands get twitchy. I look away, out over the water and the riverbank, watching Portland slide by. Businesses, apartments and parks scroll by slowly and as the sun heats up my skin I think I should have packed sunblock. I turn to mention to Jordan that we need to add that to our looting list along with my toothbrush, but I immediately turn back to the bank. A figure has emerged from a building and is running down the slope.

"Jordan, stop! Look!" I quickly grab hold of his arm, halting his rowing and pulling him in the direction of the bank.

The figure, I think it's a man, runs all out down the bank, stumbling briefly before righting himself. I can hear it now coming across the water, the sound of his cries. He's shouting loudly but I can't make out the words. I image it's something along the lines of
They are trying to eat me! Save me!

"We have to help him. Row us to shore."

"Wait."

"What?" I glance briefly at Jordan before watching the man again. I'm scared to lose sight of him, as though my notice alone will save him. "Wait for what? We have to help him."

"Just wait." he says, and his voice is oddly calm.

"Jordan!" I cry, horrified by his indifference. "They're going to eat him! We can't just sit by and watch!"

"Who, Alissa? Show me who is going to eat him?"

"The..." I look up the bank behind the running man and am shocked to find no one. No shambling zombies, no dragging half corpses. Nothing. "What... what is he running from?"

"He's not running from anything. He's running toward us."

The guy reaches the line where the water meets the shore and slows. He wades in until he is shin deep and then stops. He looks down, looks up at us, and then lets out a mournful wail.

"He's a zombie?" I ask, my voice constricted with confusion and aggravation. "I thought they couldn't run!"

I say it like it’s an accusation against him and he shrugs, never taking his eyes off the zombie on the shore.

"Me too."

I study the guy closer and see that his skin is a normal color, not pale and nearly gray as the others have been. He looks like a normal, healthy person if you can ignore the inarticulate wailing. Even that, though, is more human than the sounds the others make. Speak of the Devil. Around the corner of the building the runner came out of, a group of shamblers comes wandering out onto the grass and toward the water.

"They must be who infected him." I whisper, irrationally afraid they will hear me.

"Look!" Jordan shouts and points to the open stretch of road we can see behind the building. A car engine roars, the red compact fishtailing and then speeding out of sight. I look back to the runner and his clean appearance and relatively healthy state immediately makes sense.

"Do you think he was their friend?"

Jordan nods. "How much time do you think has passed since you first saw him?"

I'm surprised by the question. "Um, I don’t know. Two minutes max."

"Do you have a watch on?"

"No, but I have my phone still."

"Start timing this."

I pull my phone out of my pocket and look at the clock, noting the time. "What am I timing?"

He glances over at me, looks at my hands to make sure I've taken my phone out, and goes back to our zombie who still stands on the shore with his feet in the water.

"How long it takes him to go from that," he says, pointing at the runner. Then he points to the shamblers and says, “To that.”

"Do you think he will? Do they all start out like him?"

"I hope so." His tone is grim. “Otherwise we’re in trouble.”

We watch in silence for almost twenty minutes. The others make it down to shore and most walk into the water trying to get to us, but are swept away when they lose footing and the
current gets them, just as Jordan said it would. He has to row us upstream several times because the current keeps trying to take us away too, and all the while the runner stands and stares. Occasionally he yells at us and it's starting to sound hoarse, but I can’t be sure if it’s from overuse and strain or his rapid decomp.

"He's getting paler." I say in a low voice.

"Yeah. And his body has been trembling. Did you see that? He's twitching."

He’s right; the runner is starting to show signs of muscle spasm, and when he releases another shout, it comes out as a growl that tapers off into a very distinctive groan. He takes another step into the water but this time doesn't appear to notice it. He looks straight at us, his nose in the air catching our scent on the wind, then stumbles deep into the water, catches the current and is swept away.

"How long?" Jordan asks, grabbing the oars and rowing us back upstream, getting some distance between us and the zombie.

"About twenty minutes."

"Five minutes from being bitten to being taken down by The Fever. Another twenty for muscle failure." he surmises.

"And for reasoning to die out." I add. "He didn't want to go into the water at first. He knew he wouldn't make it to us."

Jordan nods in agreement. "It's good to know. If we see someone bit, we need to get the hell away from them and fast."

“Or finish them off before they change.”

“Or that, yeah.”

"You never saw it happen? Yesterday when the apartments were overrun, you didn’t see anyone change?"

It had to have happened fast and probably started almost immediately after I left. I’m lucky I was on the other side of town and made my way back on the MAX. I rode right through the wave of disease rolling out from campus and never felt it.

He hesitates and starts rowing almost lazily. “There was a girl on the couch downstairs when I got home. She had blood all over her arm and people were surrounding her, yelling to call 911. Someone said she was burning up and I ran to get ice from my room. When I got back out to the landing, there was a fight going on. I couldn’t see exactly who was attacking who but
when I went to go back downstairs and help, I ran right into this guy. He looked like your roommate did; pale, dead eyed, covered in blood. He started snapping at me, grabbing for me so I ran from him. I barely made it to my room and when I closed the door he clawed at it for forever.”

“Did someone else eventually kill him?” I ask, thinking of what he said about zombies never giving up, never getting tired.

“Yeah.” he says, picking up the pace. “You.”

I can tell from his tone and the pace of his rowing that the conversation is over, that we’re leaving it behind, but something about the story doesn’t sit right. I’ve killed only two infected so far, the guy at the marina and Zombie Boy back at the apartments, and both of them were this morning. He’s talking about things that happened yesterday evening and his door was zombie free when I arrived home. A part of this story is missing, a big part, but I don’t press for it because I’m sure he has his reasons for the omission. Besides, I’m keeping secrets of my own so who am I to judge?

We start trading back and forth on the rowing as the morning presses into afternoon. I offered to take a turn several times during the early morning, but Jordan shook his head and rowed on. He obviously has something on his mind, something I’d bet anything is related to the missing piece of his story, and somehow the rowing seems to help him. He was sweaty and his arms were shaking by the time he let me take over and I wanted to say something to him but I kept quiet. We have to stop every time we switch, pulling over to the shore and trading places on land. On this last swap, we decided to stop at a park and eat a small lunch in the shade. Both of us are pink from the sun and I’m thinking we need to find sunscreen sooner rather than later.

“How’s your Milky Way?” he asks, crunching a Cheetoh, his fingers Oompa Loompa Orange from the coating. He’s not the kind that licks them clean after each chip and I admire the restraint. Boy has manners, even in the end of days.

“Phenomenal. How’re your chips treatin’ ya?”

He frowns. “Stale.”

“You should write the company, get a refund.”

He chuckles. “
Dear Cheetoh Zombie Overlord
,”

“I’m sorry, ‘overlord’?”

“He’s probably one of the wealthiest zombies on the planet. He’ll be an overlord by the weekend.”

“You are so weird.”

“You’re so rigid.”

“Hey!” I toss my wadded up candy wrapper at his face. “I am not rigid.”

“You packed wet naps.”

“Oh, I’m sorry that I don’t like being filthy.”

“The world is ending. We’re killing zombies. Dirty hands are acceptable.” he says, wiggling his grubby fingers at me.

“The world isn’t ending.” Quietly says the girl who just classified these as the “end of days”. It’s one thing to think it in my head, it’s entirely another to hear him say it.

We haven’t seen much of anyone, living or dead, not since the incident on the shore. That little tidbit we picked up, that they’re ambulatory for almost half an hour before they slow down, is still haunting us both. No wonder this spread so fast. We keep finding little pockets of the city that plainly show the chaos that took place last night. That’s still taking place today. Sirens wail in the distance in some areas but they aren’t emergency vehicles. They’re fire and burglar alarms. Stores and houses are being ransacked, some of them even burned. Throughout the day, plumes of smoke have started to appear across the sky line and I’m so grateful to Jordan that he brought me with him, that he didn’t let me stay in that apartment alone. The situation is worsening here and help does not appear to be on the way.

We’ve seen others on the river. A few, not many, and we don’t speak as we pass each other. Grim looks and heavy nods are all that pass between us, because really what is there to say?

“The world we knew,” Jordan counters. “That one is ending.”

I nod, admitting he’s right. “No more movies.”

“No more Michael Bay films. Pro.”

“We’re living a Michael Bay film. Con.”

“No more reality TV. Pro.”

“No more Kardashian tabloid covers. Big pro.”

“No more Kardashian sex tapes. Con.” he says sadly.

“Gross.” I reply judgingly. “You didn’t actually watch it, did you?”

Jordan shrugs and smirks at me. “I’m a man with internet access. What do you think?”

“Gross.” I repeat

“No more fast food.”

“This could be the last Milky Way I ever eat.”

“No more Twinkies.”

“They’re already gone, remember? Bankrupt.”

“Shit, that’s right. Wow. Pluto isn’t a planet anymore, Twinkies are extinct and zombies walk the earth.”

“If that doesn’t spell out apocalypse, I don’t know what does.”

Jordan chuckles and grabs a wet nap to wipe his fingers clean. My smile is wide and smug.

“You gonna call your uncle, check in with him?

“No. We’re not out of the woods yet.”

It’s a dark outlook to take but it’s the truth. We aren’t in the clear yet and I don’t want to tell my uncle I’m out of the city and safe just to die ten minutes later.

“Fair enough.”

I look at Jordan and his face looks so incredibly tired. I wonder if he got much sleep last night or if it’s exhaustion from his rowing session.

“Are you going to call your family?”

“Not yet.”

“No one else you want to talk to? To check in on?” I dig, and I don’t know why I’m doing it.

Jordan looks at me sideways. He looks at me like he knows exactly why I’m asking and the edges of his mouth twitch.

“Nope. It’s just you and I.” he says, and my stomach flips.

“For now.” I reply, my voice hollow.

He pauses. “Still thinking about taking off on your own, huh?”

I look at him and I feel kind of bad. He’s looking down at his hands, tearing the used wet nap into strips, and his face is blank.

“Yeah.” I say softly. “I won’t go until you’re somewhere safe, though.”

He laughs darkly and wads the strips of thin, wet cloth. “Don’t worry about me and don’t do me any favors.”

“Why are you so mad about this?”

“You can trust me, Alissa.” he mumbles.

I blink, taken aback by his seriousness. “And I do. I wouldn’t be here now if I didn’t.”

“Whatever, let’s go.” He stands abruptly and leans down to take his pack.

I reach out and grab his wrist, holding it tight until he looks me in the eye.

“Jordan.”

“I can keep you safe.” he says, his voice hard. Determined.

“I know you can. You have. More than once.”

“Then stay. I’ll protect you.”

His eyes are boring into mine and there’s an intensity that stuns me. I don’t know what this is about, because it’s certainly not about me, but I do know that I want to stay with him more than anything. He’s so sure of himself, so self-possessed it’s almost inspiring. I feel steady and strong with him and when my meds are gone that’s exactly what I’ll need. Strength and fortitude. I want to have that, I would kill to have that. But at what cost to him?