“Brilliant,” I said. I looked over at Ash, who was hoisting a backpack over his shoulder. He was pale, and he looked terrible. His hair was hanging in his face, and there was a slight tremble in the grip that he had on his own handgun. “Are we going?”
My dad looked around the brownstone, and I knew he was thinking similar things that I had been thinking upstairs. Like me, my dad had grown up in this house as a child, had lived in it his entire life. When my parents had gotten married so young and had no place to go, they moved into the basement and my grandparents had taken care of them. We had both taken our first steps here, had birthday parties and lived our lives here. I had my very first kiss on that porch step, had watched millions of Mets games and cooked too many dinners in that kitchen.
Bandit was whining behind the basement door; he always hated being locked up down there. My dad closed his eyes for a moment and then sighed. “Yeah. Let’s go.”
HE EASED THE FRONT DOOR open slowly, pausing every time it made even the smallest sound. He checked outside, his gun held out in front of him, before he motioned for the two of us to follow him. I thought of the many times that I had tripped down these stupid steps and hoped to god that I would not do that now. There was a heavy stench in the air, of blood and rotting flesh and death, and I tried so hard to keep myself from throwing up.
We had nearly made it to the car when there was a crack. My dad and I looked behind us where Ash’s eyes and mouth were open wide, his foot on a stick that had cracked in half when he’d stepped on it. All three of us looked in the direction of the Awakened, whose scary black eyes were all focused on us.
“Shit,” my dad hissed. “Get in the car. Get in the car now!”
We dropped all pretenses of silence and sprinted to the car, flinging ourselves into the car. I had barely strapped myself in when my dad peeled out, taking out a few bodies that had thrown themselves in our path.
“They can’t slow us down.” Dad shouted at me as he sped down our street. “We only have two hours to be a safe distance away from the city.”
“Safe from what?”
“They’re nuking New York City and the surrounding areas. Brooklyn, Queens, Manhattan, all of it. They’re doing it to all the major cities,” he said, taking a swift left, throwing me into the window.
“What?” I shrieked and then clapped my hand over my mouth as the sound echoed through the car.
“They’re just giving up? It’s only been three days,” Ash shouted from the backseat.
“They figured it would be better to just neutralize the problem off the bat,” he explained, taking sharp turns and speeding to the exit out of the city. “They’re nuking the other major cities too, the ones I was mentioning before, any area that has a huge population with the virus.”
“Jesus,” I said, paralyzing fear ripping through my body. They were going to blow up my city, the city I had grown up in my entire life. I looked behind me at Ash, who looked as shocked as me. “How do you know?”
He slammed on his brakes when we came up to several other vehicles before taking another right to go around them. “It was an accident.” He didn’t say more than that.
“How much time do we have?” I said. I felt the frozen pizza that Ash and I had cooked over the stove churn in my stomach, as we screeched through an alley, barely fitting.
“Two hours. Hopefully we can get as far away from the city as possible, and then we can regroup and find some supplies. I have some stuff, since we were supposed to leave anyway, but not everything. And Ash needs clothes.” He glanced over at me as we went sailing out of the city. “And we need to stock up on ammunition, maybe grab a couple more guns.”
“They’re blowing up my city,” I whimpered, turning around in my seat. “And we left Bandit.” Tears filled up my eyes again, and my dad leaned over and squeezed my thigh briefly before returning to his tear down the highway.
There were cars everywhere, people everywhere, and there was a state of panic. The blue tone of the Awakened seemed to outnumber the regular, normal skin tones of people who weren’t sick. I felt helpless strapped in this car as we barreled through. We were getting out, but none of these people knew. There was already so much chaos.
“Dad, why can’t we tell anyone?” I said softly, pressing my hands over my eyes, shutting out the destruction, trying to ignore the raspy breaths and the screams. The air around me was filled with screams of pain and the screams of people calling out for help.
He shook his head, pained. “No, we can’t do that.”
“Dad!” I yelled. “What is wrong with you? All these people…they’re going to die! We can’t…we can’t just let them die.”
“Zoey…”