I spent a lot of time in the shower. It was the one place in the house where Ash couldn’t go. It was the only thing in the entire apartment that worked. I turned the knob, and water came out. I stood under the steaming hot water, trying so hard not to think about anything, except getting clean.
Every time we looked out the window, it looked like more and more zombies had shown up; more of them were wandering the streets. They were always covered in blood, and sometimes they even had limbs hanging from their mouths, like a snack they were saving for later. It was revolting, especially when a fight would break out over the smallest bit of flesh. They all had raspy breaths. It sounded exactly like every worse nightmare I’d ever had. Sometimes, in the middle of the night (or maybe the day, it was so hard to keep track), you could hear them as they made their way down the street.
The radio silence, the calm that seemed to have taken over the city, was unnerving. I was used to the sounds of the subway, cars honking at the kids playing soccer in the streets.
That’s why, when the sound of gunfire reached my ear, I completely toppled out of my bed and landed on the hardwood floor with a crash. I lifted my head, and heard it again, the gunfire, and the sound of cars screeching by.
“Ash,” I called loudly and uncertainly. “Ash!”
I heard a loud crash downstairs that reverberated through the house; I turned on my heel and raced downstairs.
“Zoey!”
“Dad!” I cried, flying into his arms. He was an absolute wreck; his shirt was torn, and his jeans were dirty and covered in blood. There was a hefty gash across his forehead, and a nasty bruise forming right on his jawline. He caught me up, just like when I was a little girl. “Dad, you’re hurt.”
“I’m fine,” he said, hastily wiping at the gash on his forehead, smearing blood into his hair. “It’s not bad. Where’s Ash?”
“Here, I’m right here,” Ash said, coming out of the kitchen still armed with the fireplace poker. “What’s going on?”
I could hear sirens in the distance, mixed in with the occasional scream. The sounds of fallen footsteps as people ran past our brownstone reached my ears, and I could hear the rattling breaths of the zombies, just as Madison’s had been. I wanted to cover my ears, to shut it all out. Instead, I grabbed the gun and retrieved the holster from the case that I had left open in the coat closet.
“They’re all over the city,” my dad explained, as he reloaded his own gun and slid it into its holster. He passed me a box of ammunition without meeting my eyes. I knew we were both thinking that this was never the purpose of my gun lessons. “We weren’t sure what they were until people started reporting their dead family members alive, and that’s when you told me about Madison.” He took another gun out of the waistband of his jeans, loaded it and held it out to Ash.
Ash balked. “I don’t…I don’t know how to use one.”
“Take it, kid,” Dad said, his voice grave. “You just gotta aim.”
He took it, staring at it for a moment before his grip tightened on it. He took the holster my dad was holding and strapped it around his hips. “Well, I do play a lot of Call of Duty.”
I threw him an exasperated look but turned back to Dad. “So what’s going on? Why do you look so beat up?”
“They attacked the station. They’ve been attacking all of them, all the major cities: here, Los Angeles, Boston, Chicago…at least eight or nine cities.” He reached into the closet, where the safe was and pulled out his extra gun case, the one I didn’t even have access to. He yanked out three more guns and his rifle and packed them in his old gym bag. “We didn’t know what to think. What do you think? But then they started attacking everyone, ripping them to shreds. They kept wailing on and on about being hungry.”
“That’s exactly what Madison was doing,” I said, strapping my own holster around my hips.
“Where is she?” he asked, looking up from his task and meeting my eyes. I looked down, unable to answer. “Oh, okay, all right. Well, we need to get away. We need to go. The Awakened are everywhere.”
“What? Awakened?”
Dad sighed. “That’s what they’re calling them, the…eople. They’re not zombies, and no one feels right calling them zombies. Someone on TV said Awakened, and that’s what they are now. It doesn’t matter right now. Let’s go.”
“Dad, they’re everywhere,” I said aghast. “We’ll never get past them. They’re fast…”
“I know they’re fast, okay? And they’re incredibly smart. This isn’t like anything we ever expected. They’re aware and able to communicate, and they look exactly like the people we know, except they’re not. And they only seem to want one thing: us. So we need to go. Now.”
I looked out the window and saw that there were even more zombies outside. There was a nondescript black SUV parked haphazardly on the sidewalk, and I immediately recognized it as a vehicle my dad sometimes used from the station. “There are just too many for the two of us, Dad.”
“The three of us,” he corrected.