In his dreams, he roamed the streets, vision gone bloody red. When he saw life, he was compelled to hunt it down, to shamble after it. He stumbled towards a young girl, maybe twelve or thirteen. When he got close, he realized it was Jackie, his baby sister, as she’d been ten years ago, when they were still kids. He couldn’t stop, he was reaching for her, he was going to eat her… only when she opened her mouth to scream what came out instead was the sound of a fist on wood. Gradually he woke from the dream, to find that the knocking was real. He sat up, extracting himself from Lauren on the bathroom floor. Ah, he thought, waking fully from his dream. This. He rubbed sleep from his eyes, and when he looked up, Clint was poking his head in.
"I’m not dead yet,” Victor said, and Clint grinned. “In fact, I’m feeling better.”
“Do you feel happy?” Clint asked, and it was Victor’s turn to grin.
“Shut up, please,” Lauren said.
Victor looked over at her. He pushed her hair off her face and she opened one eye.
“I have to get up now, don’t I?” she asked.
He nodded. “It’s the apocalypse, honey. No sleeping in.”
She groaned. “Don’t call me honey. What are you, fifty?”
“You’re supposed to be excited that I didn’t turn into a zombie,” he said.
“I am excited. Or rather, I will be excited when I’ve had more sleep. While you were sleeping like an undead baby, I was staying awake all night to be sure you didn’t actually turn into one.”
He nodded. “Sleep a bit more, then, Clint and I can talk about what we’re going to do next. We need some kind of plan.”
“Oh sure,” she mumbled. “Make plans without…” here she trailed off, falling immediately to sleep.
Victor stood, and winced at the pain of it. Maybe he wasn’t turning into a zombie, but that undead old man had taken a big chunk out of his shoulder, and it wasn’t going to heal anytime soon. He stretched as gently as he could, limbered up his shoulder, and then followed Clint out of the bathroom and into the room.
He looked at the bed, and it was still made. “Did you sleep at all?” Victor asked.
Clint shrugged. “Yeah, I slept on the floor.”
“Why?”
“I guess it didn’t seem right, you guys sleeping in the bathroom and me comfy in that big bed. Plus, I wanted to be as close as possible to the door in case… well, you know.”
Victor was silent for a moment. “Well I suppose I can’t be mad at you for wanting to shoot me yesterday, then, can I?”
“Nope.”
Victor looked around. The room was dusty, and ridiculously hot. He wiped sweat from his eyes and took a closer look around. The plaster was peeling in the corners of this room too, and the chairs were about thirty years out-of-date. He sat down on the bed, and it creaked, giving just a little beneath his weight. There were plentifully stocked vending machines in the halls. He remembered running past them. The place was shitty, but for a first day zombie apocalypse shelter, not so bad.
“So what next?” Victor said, looking up from the bed. “Should we stay here for a while? Food, shelter, and I think we’ve pretty well cleared it of the dead.”
Clint closed his eyes and rubbed at his temples. “I don’t know. I don’t think so.”
“Why not?”
“Think about it, man,” Clint said. “We’re what, a couple miles outside of the city?”
Victor nodded.
“When the dead run out of food, they’re going to have to start hunting for it. Do we really want to be in a building with a hundred windows and half a dozen doors when that happens?”
“I guess not, but how do you know they’ll roam? How do you know they’ll look for food?” Victor asked.
Clint stepped towards the window, peering into the empty parking lot in both directions. “I don’t. I thought you’d turn into a zombie and I was wrong. I might be wrong about this too, but for all intents and purposes these zombies seem to act like predators – and I know predators. When their hunting grounds run out of food, they range out further or they die. What else do we have to go on?”
Instead of answering, Victor grabbed the TV remote. What did they have to go on? Well, maybe the news. Sure, the lights were off, but the water was running, so why not the TV? Maybe someone had only turned out the lights, everything else seemed to have power. He tried the power button, and sure enough, the TV flickered on. He felt pretty stupid for not trying the lights the night before, but maybe it’d been for the best to stick with flashlights. Brighter lights might have attracted more zombies. Most of the channels were off the air, but eventually he found a news broadcast that was still up.
A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.
The anchor looked exhausted, his clothes a mess and stained in a few spots with blood.
“Again,” he was saying, “we’re staying on the air here for as long as we can, to get as much information out as possible. More and more cell towers in the state are going down, but most of our information has come from social media. So, if you can find a way, please contact us if you learn anything. Also, please continue to send us your home videos as you have them. All of our news crews have gone dark, there’s just a few of us left in the station here, and, well, anyone out there who can shed some light on the current disaster, we’ll put you on the air if we’re able.
“We haven’t really gotten much new news in the last couple hours. The temperature anomaly is expanding further into the continental United States, but the temperature here in Washington is holding at around 110 degrees.
“It’s been thirty-two hours since I was bitten,” here he pulled his shirt up to reveal a large bite mark in his side, “and so, contrary to what many of you have been tweeting, it doesn’t seem that the bites turn you. We have had numerous confirmations that the dead are rising, but currently it seems that the bites do not kill you. We’re not certain what does cause reanimation, but again, the bites do not appear to kill you. So please, stop executing the bitten.”
The anchor paused. He removed his glasses and rubbed his eyes for a moment, and then returned his glasses to the bridge of his nose and looked at the camera again. “For those of you who might just be joining us, the dead are rising from Calgary to eastern Montana to the northern tip of California. No similar reports have been forthcoming from Asia, Europe, Africa, or Australia. In what we can only guess is a related event, the temperature is well past a hundred degrees Fahrenheit in the entire state of Washington. This anomaly has expanded to neighboring states, and into southwestern Canada, at what seems roughly to be the same speed as the rising dead. It should be raising more eyebrows, this intense heat in February, but with thousands dying by the hour in what can only be described as a zombie apocalypse, well…” he looked down at his desk and shuffled some papers around. After a moment of this, he just stopped and stared at the reports.
Victor and Clint said nothing, their eyes were locked onto the TV screen, and even though the anchor seemed to have run out of momentum, they could only watch, wait.
Shortly the anchor put his hand to his ear, and his eyes returned to focus.
“My producer has informed me that we just received a clip from central Washington. Apparently,” he stopped and laughed, shook his head. “Apparently, the sky is on fire in central Washington. I don’t know anymore, let’s just see the clip.”
There was nothing for a second, and then Victor was looking at what was probably cell phone footage of central Washington. You didn’t forget rock formations, sweeping valleys, and mountains like that once you’d seen them.
“Are you getting this, dude?” someone was saying off camera.
“Yeah, shut up,” said a second voice.
And then Victor saw it. At first, he’d thought the sun was just rising, but that wasn’t it. The sky was red, all right, but not from the sun. It had been night still when the footage was shot, but the sky was bright with flames. The fire was moving towards the camera, and you could hear the guys breathing heavily behind the camera. It was a storm front, the clouds red instead of gray. There were thin lines of red, ten thousand miniature comets streaking flame through the sky. It was raining fire in central Washington.
They cut back to the anchor. “I’m receiving word now that the President is preparing to address the nation. We’re having trouble getting information from outside the state as more and more communications facilities are going down, but we do have a feed. Again, this is the President, as he addresses our nation in this dark hour.”
Clint grabbed the remote and shut the TV off.
“What the hell, man?” Victor said. “The President was about to talk, turn it back on.”
Clint shook his head. “We got what we needed to know already, we weren’t going to get any more than that.”
“But,” Victor started.
“‘Blah, blah, blah. Great nation. Mobilizing the army to combat the threat, our allies overseas standing by to help us in our time of need, blah, blah, apple pie.’ That’s all you were gonna get, and that’s valuable time we could be spending on a survival plan.”
“Okay, fine, let’s plan then,” Victor said. “Seems like we have two choices. We’re not going east back through the city, and we’re not staying here. We’re most definitely not going west towards the raining fire. So it’s north to Canada, or south to Oregon.”
“I think we need to go west," Clint said.
“Excuse me?”
“Think about it,” Clint started.
“What’s there to think about? I don’t want to die on fire.”
“Forget the flaming sky. If that was even real, which I highly doubt –”
“Hang on,” Victor said. “The dead are rising and it’s 110 degrees in February and you think someone is faking cell phone footage of the sky raining fire?”
Clint was silent for a minute. “Okay, fine, even so, I still say west. If it does rain fire on us, we can take shelter in the mountains until it passes. Weather has always been a secondary threat – if you prepare for it, it can’t hurt you. I mean, think about it – the real danger is still the walking dead. And if all the living people are afraid to go west…”
“… then there won’t be any zombies to contend with either.” Victor finished.
Clint nodded. “Or at least, fewer zombies.”
“But west… that’s the wrong way. I was hoping at some point to circle east. My family, Jackie –”
Clint nodded. “You know I love your kid sister, man. I’ve got an uncle and a bunch of cousins in Florida, too. But it’s not them in the thick of the apocalypse, it’s us. They have time to prepare. We have to survive first, before we can start to worry about getting back with family.”
Victor stared at the blank TV screen. Clint wasn’t wrong. And he had Lauren to think about. Jackie had grown into a strong woman, she would take care of their parents if it came to that.
“Okay, so what’s the objective then? Hide in the mountains and hope for the best?” Victor said.
“Not exactly. We’ll travel right through the crazy weather and come out on the other side, on the coast.”
“Boats,” Victor said.
Clint smiled. “Now you’re getting me. We can try to catch a boat to Hawaii, or, or Japan or something. You heard the reporter, no dead rising in Asia, and no crazy weather either.”
“Okay,” Victor said, rubbing his forehead. “So, we’re going towards the flaming rain, got it. We might at least want to swing by a sporting goods store and pick up some kind of fire-proof umbrellas.”
The bathroom door opened then, and Lauren stepped out, looking sleepy. “Did I just hear the words ‘fire-proof umbrellas’? I thought you two were planning our next move.”
“You did, we were, and yes, it’s precisely what it sounds like,” Victor said.