Just Another Day in the Zombie Apocalypse (Episode 3) Read online

  Just Another Day

  In the Zombie Apocalypse

  Episode 3

  L.C. Mortimer

  Copyright: L.C. Mortimer

  Published: 2016

  Publisher: Amazon Kindle

  The right of L. C. Mortimer to be identified as author of this Work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in retrieval system, copied in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise transmitted without written permission from the publisher. You must not circulate this book in any format.

  When their safe house turns out to be anything but, Mark, Alice, and Kyle decide to go on the run once more.

  They’re looking for hope, but they only find desperation.

  Mark fights his night terrors with the only thing that keeps him calm.

  Alice wonders if she’ll ever be able to get past her brother’s death. What can she do when every Infected reminds her of him?

  Kyle struggles to breathe as his stress levels increase. With each passing hour, he wonders how much longer he can really survive the end of the world.

  With each passing hour, he wonders if he wants to.

  Just Another Day in the Zombie Apocalypse is an episodic serial and should be read in order. Each episode ends in a cliffhanger and leads directly into the next story.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Author

  More

  Chapter 1

  Alice wasn’t scared of anything.

  She told herself this every day.

  She wasn’t scared of anything, she wasn’t afraid of anything, and she certainly wouldn’t be brought down by anything.

  Nothing could touch her because she was a rock. She was hard. She was strong. She wouldn’t let the end of the world break her heart and she certainly wouldn’t let a fucking infection be the thing that killed her.

  No, Alice planned to go out fighting.

  She planned to go out swinging.

  But when she saw the body in the little room at the top of the stairs, Alice was afraid. What was left of her broken heart shattered, and she collapsed on the floor. She heard shrieking, but didn’t realize it was her own voice until Mark and Kyle came running, until they dragged her from the room. She cried out, screaming until they got her back in the master bedroom and closed the door, until they tucked her into the solitude and the silence of the room.

  Mark sat on the bed and held her in his lap. He wrapped his thick, muscled arms around her and pulled her close to his body. He made her feel tiny, and small, and precious, and he just held her. He held her.

  “I told you not to go in there,” he said, but Alice couldn’t speak. She couldn’t do anything but cry. She couldn’t do anything but feel the tears running down her cheeks and wonder why she hadn’t listened.

  Why hadn’t she listened?

  She should have trusted Mark’s judgment. She should have respected what he said, because he was right: he had warned her to stay out. She thought when she pushed the door open that it would be okay. She thought when she stepped inside the room that the smell would be the worst part of it all, but she had been wrong.

  She had been so wrong.

  “They had a child,” she managed to say, but no one else spoke. They had a child, and it had died. She had heard Mark kill the dog. That had been bad enough, but a child? That was unimaginable. That was impossible. The people who lived here had a child, and now it was dead.

  It.

  She couldn’t even think of it as a person.

  She couldn’t think of the child as a “he” or a “she.”

  “It” was so much less painful, so much less real.

  Her heart had already cracked and if Alice managed to think of the child as someone who once had hopes or dreams or desires, what was left of her soul might just die.

  “We can’t stay here,” she managed to whisper. Her throat hurt from screaming and it was hard to speak. Her lips were dry and her nose was stuffy and her throat hurt. Everything hurt.

  They needed to go somewhere else.

  This had seemed like a haven. This had seemed like a place they could settle, a place they could stay for a short while and not have to worry about anything. That was what she wanted, really: a break. She wanted a break from reality, a break from running, and a break from dead people.

  She just wanted normalcy.

  It had only been days since the outbreak began, but already Alice was struggling to see how the future could be anything but a continuous nightmare. She wanted to go back to her former life and appreciate it more. She could do that now. She could appreciate the things she had because now she didn’t have any of those things.

  Now she didn’t have anything but grief.

  “We’re leaving now,” Mark agreed quickly. He didn’t seem like he was interested in arguing with Alice. He didn’t seem like he wanted to try to convince her to stay here. She wondered if leaving had been his plan since the night before. When he’d gone into that room, had he tried to spare her from the details so she’d be able to sleep? Had he planned on them leaving first thing in the morning?

  Maybe he’d just wanted her to be able to rest without worrying about the closed door across the hall.

  Maybe he was trying to help her.

  Kyle seemed like he’d been up for hours even though Alice knew he’d been in a deep sleep until she screamed. She felt bad for waking them both up, felt bad they had to hurry up and get ready for their day simply because she couldn’t be bothered to listen to Mark. Had she not been so curious, had she not been so desperate to satisfy her nosiness, she could have saved herself the knowledge of what was behind the door.

  She could have saved herself from knowing there was a child who hadn’t survived the infection.

  She could have saved herself from knowing the reason the woman downstairs was infected was because she’d been taking care of her sick baby.

  She couldn’t have saved the family, but she could have saved herself, at least a little bit.

  “I’m sorry,” Alice said, looking up at Mark, but he didn’t answer her. He pulled her closer and rubbed her hair. It was an act of intimacy she and Mark didn’t typically share. They were only neighbors, after all. They hugged each other and sometimes she slept next to him after a nightmare, but that was it. During his nightmares, he was asleep. She offered him physical comfort so he could get some rest, but that was it.

  There was nothing in it for her.

  Today, though, Mark was doing something he rarely did. He was offering a bit of himself to her. He was offering up a little bit of himself to Alice, and she was going to take it. She could recognize a gift when she saw one and she wasn’t one to turn down something precious.

  The truth was that Mark was a mystery. He might be a veteran now, but in many ways, his life as a soldier still played a role in his daily life. It was impossible to know where civilian Mark ended and soldier Mark began. It was impossible to separate Mark’s past from his present, but Alice didn’t want to, didn’t need to. She didn’t feel an urge to change him or try to fix him. In her mind, Mark wasn’t broken. He was just alone. That was something Alice knew well and it wasn’t something you could just slap a bandage on
and keep going.

  There were so many levels to him that sometimes, Alice felt like she’d barely scratched the surface. He wasn’t just the hot neighbor from her building. He wasn’t just the wounded veteran who looked a little vulnerable when he thought no one was watching. He wasn’t just some guy she happened to be stranded with during the worst viral outbreak the world had ever seen.

  No, he was more than that, and he confused her sometimes. Alice wanted to know more, but Mark guarded his heart and his stories in layers of secrecy. Alice had a feeling it would take a long time to slowly strip those layers away. Luckily, the entire world had gone to shit and it seemed Alice had nothing but time.

  Mark should have screamed at her for disobeying a direct order.

  He should have yelled at her, threatened her.

  He should have completely flipped out and told her that if she couldn’t follow a simple request not to open a door, then she couldn’t be trusted to be a part of their team. She couldn’t be trusted to stay with Kyle and Mark. She couldn’t be trusted to be part of their future.

  She was a risk.

  People who didn’t listen were risky and with this infection, risks weren’t something you took easily. Risks weren’t worth it. Risks weren’t worth dying for.

  Mark didn’t yell at Alice, though. He didn’t even raise his voice.

  Instead of yelling at her, instead of telling her she shouldn’t have wandered into the room, instead of talking about the horrific things she had seen in the nursery, Mark just held her. He continued to pet her hair softly for a few minutes in the silence. Kyle just stood there, watching the two of them, not speaking.

  It would have been awkward in any other situation. In fact, it should have been. It should have been awkward and it should have been weird and it should have been uncomfortable, but it wasn’t.

  The world had changed, and as Alice sat there, she realized she had changed, too.

  She wasn’t just the legal writer anymore. She wasn’t just the coffee bringer, the proofreader, or the schedule planner. She wasn’t just the neighbor on the 11th floor who liked to bake cookies on Sunday mornings. She wasn’t just the girl whose brother had died. She was different now.

  She was a survivor now.

  When this was all over, she would be different. She would have scars and most of them wouldn’t be physical. She would have new experiences and new skills and new friends and she would be different, because it had to end sometime.

  Alice was living in a nightmare she felt would never end, but it had to. That was how nightmares worked; you had a shitty dream, and then you woke up. Things got really bad, but then they got better. The world died, but then it came back to life.

  It was the natural order of things.

  Alice had a feeling Mark and Kyle didn’t feel quite so hopeful.

  “It’s time,” Mark said after a few minutes, and he helped Alice get up. He grabbed a washcloth from the bathroom and came back to the room. He walked to where she was standing still and he reached for her cheek. Gently, he wiped her face until it was dry, until there was no more evidence of her tears. Then Mark took Alice’s hand and led her downstairs.

  She didn’t look back up as they made their way to the cars. She didn’t look back at the bedroom or at the kitchen where she knew the body of the mother lay. She didn’t look at the pictures on the walls or the baskets of toys that were now so obvious in the daylight.

  She just looked straight ahead until she was seated in the passenger seat, and then she kept looking straight.

  Mark buckled her in carefully, the way he would a child or an old woman. He was gentle with her and Alice felt like she was a sick person leaving the hospital, like she couldn’t be trusted to put on her own buckle. Somehow, she didn’t mind Mark helping her. She should mind, she reckoned. She should be offended he thought she couldn’t take care of herself, but she wasn’t.

  Mark wasn’t being mean.

  He squatted next to her and took her hand. Alice looked at him. Mark had a couple of little scars on his face, things other people wouldn’t notice, but that she did. His face told a story his words couldn’t, or wouldn’t. Mark had lived a hard life and seen things no one should ever see. He had seen things Alice knew she could never even imagine, so she didn’t try. None of that mattered, anyway.

  The only thing that mattered now was getting through the day.

  The only thing that mattered was surviving just a little bit longer.

  “I’m going to go back inside with Kyle,” Mark said slowly. “We’re going to do a quick run-through and see what other supplies we can find, okay? We might be able to find a weapon or extra food or other things we might need. We’re moving on, yeah, but we don’t want to leave behind valuable resources, okay?”

  Alice nodded. She nodded, but she didn’t say anything. Her brain was racing but her lips didn’t seem to work. She couldn’t form words. Maybe she was in shock. Maybe she was having some sort of anxiety attack. Maybe this was just what her life was going to be like from now on.

  She had seen too much death to be comfortable with it now. Long ago, she thought death was a normal part of the world. She had been forced to deal with it at a young age and had tricked herself into thinking it was normal.

  It wasn’t normal.

  None of it was normal.

  None of it was okay.

  The world now only consisted of dying. Dying and hurting. Dying and bleeding. Dying and not staying dead. Earth was still round and the sky was still blue, but the joy had been sucked out of life itself and now only the pain remained.

  Mark stood up and walked away. He left the door open. The air was cool from the previous night’s rain and Alice tried to think about the way the world still smelled like autumn. As a kid, she loved the fall. Timmy did, too. It was their favorite. They’d spend hours making leaf piles and jumping into them over and over again until Dad would finally come kick them out of the yard and do the raking himself.

  Now there were leaves but no Timmy.

  Now there were leaves but no Dad.

  Now there were leaves but nothing to do except reflect on how shitty her life choices had been and how many regrets she had.

  Alice put her hands on the dashboard and stared straight ahead. She couldn’t see anything except the child in the house and the person it could have been. She couldn’t see anything but its body. She couldn’t see anything but the fact that this family had lost someone they loved.

  And she knew what that felt like.

  ***

  Timothy had been a good kid and he’d loved living in Arla. Arla wasn’t a huge city, but it was big enough. It was large enough to have its own troubles, but small enough that Mom and Dad hadn’t cared when Timothy and Alice ran off and had fun with their friends. It was a close-knit community. It was close enough that when gang violence started becoming a thing, everyone talked to their kids about it.

  It didn’t matter, though.

  It hadn’t stopped Timmy from dying.

  It hadn’t stopped him from passing away.

  It hadn’t stopped him from “going to a better place,” or any of the other not-so-subtle euphemisms people started using when they couldn’t stand the word “died” anymore.

  His best friend had thought joining a gang would be cool. It was a small town, and gangs weren’t that serious, and they were just a cool way to fit in with the kids from the big cities nearby.

  It was just a bit of fun.

  It was just a way to be cool.

  Only it hadn’t been fun and it hadn’t been cool and Timothy had paid the price for his friend’s decision. He had died alone and betrayed when he should have been getting ready to try out for football or working up the courage to ask someone to the dance. He was just a kid and then he was just a corpse and none of it made sense.

  It had never made sense.

  The thing about grief is that everyone has a stupid opinion about it. People dance around pain like doing so is going to lessen it.
Alice’s friends and teachers and neighbors all seemed to think that pretending Timmy hadn’t existed at all was the best way to move forward, but it wasn’t. After he died, Alice didn’t want to forget.

  She wanted to remember.

  She wanted to remember jumping in the leaves with her brother. She wanted to remember late-night runs to Sonic for slushies. She wanted to remember the things they talked about in the car or how silly they danced when they were just goofing off together. She wanted to remember playing video games all weekend and she wanted to remember the jokes he made up to see if she’d smile.

  She didn’t want to forget Timothy, but everyone else did.

  And that made it worse. Pretending someone didn’t exist was worse than saying the wrong thing about their death. Alice couldn’t stand the comment, “Everything happens for a reason.” She would choke if she had to hear “I’m sorry for your loss” one more time.

  But none of that was as bad as the people who knew Timmy, but who refused to talk about him.

  It wasn’t as bad as the people who seemed content to cut him out of their hearts and their memories like he had meant nothing to them.

  He had meant everything to Alice.

  After Alice finished high school, Mom and Dad couldn’t stand Arla anymore. They couldn’t take living in the same house where they’d laid their son to rest. They packed up and moved to Florida, leaving Alice to figure out her future alone.

  That was when she moved to Holbrook. She went for college and stayed for work and somehow, she managed to make a life for herself there.

  She managed to create a world where she could quietly miss her brother and try to honor him on her own.

  Mom and Dad rarely spoke to her after the move.

  She wasn’t even sure if they were still married.

  It seemed strange to her sometimes. When she thought about it too much, Alice felt like there was a huge weight on her chest. How could a couple abandon their only living child? Didn’t they know that she was hurting, too? Their pain had been great, but Alice had been a teenager when he died. His death had been her introduction into the “real world.” His death had been the destruction of her idyllic childhood.