That left Hastings and Captain Keller.
The shower turned off. Dax stopped singing.
Tony pointed at the ceiling. “Give it ten minutes or so to refill. Then you should be good to go, too.”
Dax started up again. I imagined him belting away as he toweled off his hair.
“Is that Journey?” I asked, trying to make out the words.
Tony cocked his head to the side, and a sly grin slipped across his face. “Streetlight peeeeoplleeeeee…”
After a lukewarm shower and a careful examination of the available clothing, I settled on pajama bottoms and a sweatshirt to sleep in. The house apparently came equipped with a functioning heater, but Tony was loathe to turn it on, claiming some sort of energy monitoring. We each had our own bedroom on the second floor, along with plenty of blankets, so I figured we’d cope in the chill.
Someone had lived here before—that much was obvious. The place was clean and the sheets were fresh, but all this nice furniture, the garish paint job—who had owned this townhouse? From what I’d seen so far, Hastings seemed relatively untouched. Why had they left it?
They left it because things fell apart, idiot.
The twin-sized bed was small, but it beat the tiny, stinky mattress from the brig—and there was something so relaxing about not having a zombie staring at me while I tried to catch some shut-eye. I kept opening my eyes, expecting to see his milky orbs staring at me, but there was only the darkness of the room, and the occasional settling of the house.
After months of sharing a tent or cell with someone else, an entire bedroom of my own was weird.
Really, really weird.
The dog might have made it easier to bear, but our traitorous golden wench had opted to sleep with Dax, leaving me alone with my frayed nerves and a lot of uneasy thoughts.
I rolled from one side of the bed to another, trying not to get lost in the jumble of memories that kept threatening to surface. I’d become shockingly good at compartmentalizing—at tucking my hopes, my sorrows, and all my various fears into a little box and ignoring it while I tried to survive. That was easy enough to do when we were running from the undead or getting chased by crazy religious guys or irradiated biker gangs, when I was focused on survival alone. But alone in a tiny bed, in a quiet house?
Killer, man. Killer.
I had almost managed to nod off when the soft rumble slipped in through my windows.
It took me a few moments to figure out exactly what I was hearing. You get used to certain sounds when things go bad. The wail of the hungry undead. The screams of the terrified living. The crush of falling buildings and the low grumble of the land, still shifting after it took that battering.
This sounded like people, but they weren’t screaming.
Nor did they sound terrified.
They sounded…happy?
Even joyous.
I sat up in bed, knocking aside some of the covers. The chill air swept around me, and I forced myself to climb out, my sock-covered feet moving slowly across the carpet.
Yes. People were yelling. Cheering. It took me a few seconds to place that sort of enthusiasm; not a concert…no, I was listening to some sort of far-off sporting event, a rejuvenated baseball team, maybe, or the return of college football.
Hastings used to have a lot of sports fields. When I worked my way through college as an EMT we came out here semi-frequently, treating broken bones, handling asthma or pulled muscles or the occasional panic attack from the dance moms. It wasn’t entirely inconceivable that someone would put one of those fields to work—shit, Hastings was basically a military town now. All those young soldiers needed some way to work off energy when they weren’t fighting zombies, right?
The crowd whooped.
Baseball, maybe? Football? I couldn’t line up the rhythm of the cheering to the cadence of any particular sport, but then again, I hadn’t been much into sports back in the old days.
Maybe I just hadn’t heard happy people in too long. After shit goes down and the world as you know it ends, you get used to the screams, to the sadness, to all the bad stuff, and you forget what the good sounds like. When you finally do hear real glee, it’s jarring.
The event or movie or whatever it was went on for quite some time. I curled up in bed, focusing on it, hearing it as static noise instead of a lively event. People, somewhere, in this time or some previous one, were happy. And that was a fine thing to hear.
Chapter Three
I will always fondly remember Doctor Brenda Lattimore for attempting to explain the living dead to the frightened residents of the Midlands Cluster.
Gloria Fey had been operating out of Hastings right after the meteors fell—during the waning days of broadcast television, if you want to be specific—and had gone to Lattimore when it became clear that those who had started biting everyone in sight weren’t just sick, they were freaking undead. Lattimore had been placed in the unenviable position of educator, surgeon general, and deliverer of bad news.