Airborne

"What if I read the note wrong?" Cleo asked in a quiet voice as we reached the door. Justin and Spencer didn't speak, both of them too doubtful in the first place. I sighed, nudging her.

"If you were right, then hey, cool, we just found a momentarily safe location. And if you were wrong, we'll kill all the zombies inside and then, hey, cool, we just created a momentarily safe location," I said, smiling at her and walking forward, throwing the door open more violently then necessary for emphasis. Immediately all of us raised our guns, scanning the room.

Thankfully the only people were inside were humans, huddling in the corner, each clutching a gun and covered in dirty blankets. They were our humans.

"It's us," Lucinda, Cleo's mom said, her voice soft and her face gaunt. The apocalypse was taking the biggest toll on her. She'd always been so gentle, so anti-violence, and then she was thrown into a world of murder and blood.

"Don't shoot," Blaze said indifferently, not even looking up from the gun he was polishing. No matter how hard he tried, he would never get off all the dust and blood. They were stuck on there, a permanent reminder of what we went through.

"Hey," I said to the contents of the room and lowered my gun. The three beside me did the same and we entered. It was freezing, I could tell even though I was overheated from running. It would have been nice if the windows weren't gone, but breaking glass seemed to be a habit of the zombies.

We each joined the circle, but still held out weapons tightly.

"How much Ammo'd you get?" My brother’s friend, Nitro, said, adjusting his dirty swim goggles that sat on top of his head. We all took off our back packs, chucking them into the middle of the circle.

"Each of our backpacks are full," Justin said, dumping the contents of his out onto the floor. Each of them reached out, loading their guns.

All together there was sixteen of us:

Me, Emmaline Louis, Justin, my brother, who was nineteen. There was Spencer, My uncle on my dad’s side, and his Wife, my aunt Suzanna. Nitro, Justin's friend, Blaze Carter, family friend, Roy Carter, Blaze's father, Marcia Carter, Blaze's mother. Cleo Barton, my best friend and her mother Lucinda Barton. Ava Lane, Cleo's cousin. Sunday Miller, Ava and Cleo's cousin, and her Fiancé Logan Hudson. Finally, there was Wesley Collington, my neighbor, and his tagalong I’d never met previous to the apocalypse, Georgia Hamilton.

In most movies, there were only four or five people together at a time. But we had all managed to find each other, and we had strength in numbers. We constantly had people watching our back when we were swarmed by the undead, the risk of being over powered slimmer.

Also if one of us decided to lose it and go nuts with their gun, there were more of us to stop them. We were lucky this many of us hadn’t been infected.

“So where’s our next move?” Wes asked, ignoring Georgia’s never-ending stare. They had a past, a complicated one, that much was obvious. If there wasn’t a chance that they could be dead at any moment, I would have asked him.

But who cares about the lives of two walking corpses?

Not me, I thought to myself, putting my gun beside me so I didn’t fiddle with the trigger.

“I don’t know,” Spencer said, rubbing his eyes. Spencer was our leader, the one who called all the shots. Everyone looked to him for guidance, as if he were the eldest in our doomed gang. But Spencer was only thirty-six, while Lucinda was in her early forties, and Blaze’s parents were slightly older than her.

But they were all squirmy, panicked humans, more childish than most of the teens in the group. They behaved as if they were newborns, being taught how to live, how to walk. Roy had never even held a gun. Spencer was a natural born leader, and if the sixteen of us were a nation, then he was our adored President.

Which made the fact that he’d just uttered the words, I don’t know, a death sentence.

“The only TV’s we came across were disconnected, for all I know the rest of the world’s been infected too.”

The beginning of the infection in America began in California. It ripped through its neighboring states in a matter of hours. The majority of us were from Nevada, one of the secondary states to get hit by the disease. Ava, Sunday, Logan and Nitro had been visiting family for new years, having lived in separate states. Ava was from Wyoming, Sunday and Logan from Illinois, and Nitro from Washington. Honestly, it was some ungodly act that we all ended up together.

Once the infection spread to New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, Colorado and Kansas were evacuated, as best the government could manage. Military officers in quarantine suits surrounded the border of Montana, Wyoming, Colorado and New Mexico, shooting anything that appeared to be a zombie on sight, in hopes to contain the disease.

Last we heard it was working, but some of the undead were still slipping through the cracks, coming in hordes at the gunman, killing some, infecting others before being gunned down by back up officers. But that news had come to us four days ago on a static plagued television in the basement of an abandoned house.

For all we knew the zombies had managed to break through the governments human wall and were taking chunks out of the citizens on the east side. But if that wasn’t the case, then half of America was still a safe house.

Unfortunately for us, Nevada wasn’t evacuated. We were left to fight our way out of zombie territory, the world considering us lost causes or metaphorically the walking dead. But in the past two weeks, we’d covered a lot of ground. We were already in Arizona. Just a bit longer and we’d be in New Mexico where hopefully, we’d find some military people.

If we didn’t find them, we would just keep pushing across the country until we were all dead or infected.

“Well, if the zombies have gotten past the military and are infecting the rest of America, we’re sort of screwed,” Georgia said, tearing her eyes away from Wes. It was true, it’s not like we could swim the ocean and find a healthy continent. But of course, Georgia’s accurate comment was not appreciated.

Some of us liked to stay positive, liked to pretend we were going to live through this. So when people said things like that, it instantly tainted the air around us, pumping it full of tension.

Spencer hit the ground with the end of his gun, sighing, “What do you propose then, Georgia? We give up? How about you just yell out the window for a while so the zombies can just come kill us now?”

Georgia looked around, as if the words she was searching for would be floating around her.

“I just, I meant-“

“No. I’m sick of you guys giving up every time things look tough,” He said, standing. “There’s a reason we’ve made it this far, and it’s the same reason why we’re going to survive this. So stop your whining and your negativity. Because if I hear one more word about our ‘imminent’ deaths, I’ll shoot you myself.”
We were all silent, most of us staring at Spencer, some gazing at the floor.
“Now, rest up, because tomorrow, we’re heading out again.”

With that, he sat down, pulling his blanket around him and glaring at the ground.
I liked to think he was right.

Because honestly, I never felt more alive, than when I was living.

I awoke to the sound of a cough. My eyes snapped open as if I’d never been asleep, every one of my senses heightened by the noise. I sat up, my frozen fingers immediately wrapping tightly around the gun to my side. Quietly I slid out of my sleeping bag, one I’d made sure to take the day we discovered our parents were certainly infected.

I crept toward the door to the room, opening it slowly so the cans we kept stacked up in front of it simply slid across the floor and I slipped into the hall. Generally, when it came to zombie hunting, the smart thing was to bring a partner or two. But I always felt guilty waking Justin up because we rarely got to enjoy hours of peace.

The coughing echoed through the stairwell to my right and slowly, gripping my gun tightly, I headed down the stairs. I got to a corner in the stairs, and turned on the landing, aiming my gun at the bottom of the set up following steps.

A girl, much younger than me, stood at the next landing, shrunken in a corner. Her knees were hugged to her chest and tears were streaming down her dirty face. Suddenly she screamed, pointing up at me. I frowned, when a gurgling sound rang out and I spun around, aiming at where I thought it’d come from.

Above me, clinging to the roof was a zombie, with spindly, long limps. It had six arms and its mouth had been rotted away, revealing mutated pincers that had once been teeth. I gasped, sucking in my lips and shooting up at the creature as it hissed and dropped down.

“Bloody, fucking hell!”

It hit me, knocking me to the ground. Before it could get a good grip on me, I rolled awkwardly back, so it toppled off of me and down the stairs. I slid around, still sitting on the ground and shot at it. I skimmed its exposed ribs, making it let out another ear piercing shriek.

It darted to the wall to my right, climbing up it with ease. I let out a round of bullets, missing it every time. Spider zombies were one of the worst. When the infection entered the body of things other than humans, it tended to become altered, mixing with the creatures DNA. If a person was bitten by one of these zombified animals, insects or arachnids, they were given the mutated string of Mortuulantum.

This gave them some of the traits of whatever bit them, in this zombie’s case, growing extra limbs, sticky fingers for climbing walls and venomous fangs. Another irritating acquirement was spider zombies were harder to kill. It took a couple of bullets.

Have you ever tried to kill a spider, and it took a couple of smacks with a shoe or something for it to actually die? Well that’s what it was like with these kinds of zombies, but trade shoes for bullets. And even when you think you’ve beaten them, spiders, and spider zombies play dead. So, just as you begin your victory dance for killing them, they leap up and are trying to kill you all over again.

It leapt at me again, but this time I laid back, its ribs slamming into my feet with a crunching noise as I kicked back. I sat up, holding down on the trigger, its body jolting as I filled it with bullets. It let out a defeated whine, falling back and slipping down a couple of stairs, landing at the girl’s feet.

She was wide eyed, tears still flowing down her face. Her long brown hair hung in her face and she looked up at me, as if I were something unreal. I couldn’t tell if I filled her with fear or awe. Possibly both.

“You killed it,” She said in a soft voice, still frozen. I hurried down the stairs to her, jumping over the zombie.

“Are you alright?” I asked, reaching out for her, a weird instinct to nurture her rising inside of me. It must have been her young age and innocent, hazel eyes. There was a loud bang as someone threw open what I assumed was the door to the room everyone was in. I jumped, turning around to see Wes and Spencer pointing there guns down at us. “Already lost it have you?”

“Em, step away from the girl,” Wes said, his jaw set, eyes trained on the child in front of me. I frowned, glancing at her, my heart aching at the sight of her frightened expression.

“Why? You want to shoot her?”
My words caused her to go rigid, and I felt a pang of guilt. I turned to her, giving her an apologetic smile. “Don’t worry. They won’t hurt you.”

“Emmaline, get away, she could be infected!” Spencer said. I stood, blocking their view of her with my body. I had dropped my gun when I’d approached her, and it lay still at my feet.
“She’s just a kid,” I said incredulously, gesturing back at her.

“Zombie’s don’t really have any moral codes against biting children,” Wes said, rolling his eyes. I gave them a pleading look, peering back at the girl. She was shaking, trying not to cry anymore than she already was.

“Guys, the more people we have, the better.”

Justin was standing just behind them, his face a grave mask, his gun casually at his side. I think he was feeling the same thing I was. Both of us had lost our parents, become orphaned. Maybe it was the chance to extend our strange family that attracted us to her.

What was more surprising than my immediate attachment to this girl was Spencer’s distaste for her. Spencer had two children, a nineteen year old son, Dean, who was in a college in New York, possibly safe. His other son, Harvey, had been seven, and had caught mortuulantum at the beginning of the epidemic, a day or two after my mother had.

Suzanna and Spencer had strapped him tightly in a car seat, keeping him in the back seat of their car. They’d been driving down to our house, when they’d discovered us running down the path, with back packs full of supplies, guns in hand.

The sight of Harvey had been traumatizing, an image that would never leave me. He’d been in stage four, his little body pale and shaking, his eyes drooping shut, blood dribbling out of the side of his dry lips. My poor little cousin was dying in front of my eyes.

We’d gone to Cleos house, once Justin and I had explained what happened to our parents. Spencer was my mother’s brother, and he took the news of her undeath as best he could. He’d grit his teeth, taking in a slow breath through his nose and closed his eyes.

“Debbie,” He’d said at the time, his tone almost frustrated, as if he were a kid again and she had been caught stealing one of favorite action figures. After a few minutes he’d composed himself. Soon after arriving at Cleo’s house our unlikely family had formed, and Harvey had worsened.

”You’re going to be fine, Sweety, I promise,” Suzanna murmured, cradling the sick child in her arms. We’d all warned her, warned her that she was taking a risk at exposure by being so close to him. But he was too weak, not undead yet, to have any chance at biting her.

“Mommy, it’s cold,” Harvey said, his head resting on her shoulder. Tears welled in my eyes at his small, frail voice. He was too young, it wasn’t fair. He shouldn’t have gotten infected. Justin’s arm was tightly around me, and I was grateful for his presence.

Spencer stood beside Justin, his face twisted in pain. His little boy was dying. We all knew it. And soon, he’d be back, a monster.

“I need a blanket,” Suzanna said, refusing to look away from her sons face. She was sitting in Cleo’s lounge room, leaning forward on her couch. We were all crowded in the living room, watching the heart breaking scene before us.

“We can’t risk contaminating-“

“I need a blanket,” snapped Suzanna, looking up at Wes, silencing him. Cleo rushed out of the room, returning with an old, woolen blanket. Cleo helped Suzanna wrap Harvey tightly up inside the cover, unafraid of catching the childs disease.
Cleo had always been the maternal type, babying others and obsessing over children.

“Thank you.”
Harvey coughed, blood bubbling out of his mouth, dripping down his chin.

And then he died.

Because Harvey was so young, his body couldn’t adjust to the disease. When he’d died, it had been final. We knew that because Suzanna had refused to leave his body. We stayed the night at Cleo’s house, and we’d come back to the lounge room in the morning, Suzanna was still sitting on the couch, her lifeless child in her arms.

He hadn’t survived the disease, which had been a common occurrence in children. Part of me had been thankful, because at least no one would have to shoot Harvey. He was lucky anyway. He didn’t have to grow up in this zombie ridden shit hole.

Spencer had lost his youngest child. So why would he immediately want to kill the next child he found? I thought he’d have the same irrational desire to replace his lost family members like I had. But apparently not.

“Please,” I said, locking eyes with Spencer. He stared back at me, a somber look on his face.

“We’ll watch her until morning, and if she doesn’t show signs of the disease, then she lives.”
I grinned, about to spin to look at her. But his next words sent chills down my spine and made my stomach churn.

“But if she makes one wrong move, I won’t hesitate to shoot her.”