“I don’t know. Not too far I think. I can probably reach you in a few hours.”
“Well you better be quicker than that,” she said gloomily.
“What do you mean?” Ben asked, confused.
“Oh, shit that’s right, you can’t watch the news.”
“Mel, what the hell is going on out there? How do you still have power? Are there any zombies by you?” Ben asked.
“Well, yeah. There are zombies. But not many. The situation has been controlled over here. But by you… the entire East Coast, Ben… It’s…”
“It’s what, Mel? What’s wrong with the East Coast?”
There was a pause. “It’s completely fucked, Ben. And the government—well, what’s left of them anyway—they’re going to drop a bomb on it.”
Ben was at a loss. He opened his mouth but only a barely-audible squeak came out. He thought he heard Mel say something about going west, to where it was safe, but he tuned her out. A low-pitched drone was all he heard.
“Everything east of Philadelphia is going to be wiped off the map, Ben.”
Just before he was going to tell Mel that he was coming for Jake and to tell the little guy not to worry, that his father would be home soon, something hard hit Ben in the back of the head. His vision blurred before he could do or say anything. Strength abandoned his knees.
Ben collapsed into utter darkness.
Standing in the middle of the road, the kid was covered in blood from head to toe. His shirt had been reduced to tattered ribbons, his pants caked with filth and gore. His bare feet were scraped from dragging them against the pavement. Droplets of blood trickled down his fingers, forming a scarlet pool around his feet. Behind him, the sun peeked over the horizon. Rows of empty houses stood tall on both sides of the suburban road. Slowly, the kid stumbled towards Ben Ackerman, who rested on his knees, his arms open, ready to embrace his only son.
Ben heard himself cry, uttering Jake’s name.
“Daddy,” Jake said. “Daddy, you’re home.” Jake shambled toward him, zig-zagging drunkenly. “Daddy, I missed you.”
Ben told his son that he missed him too. Very much. More tears fell from his eyes. Ben watched his son grow closer, a tiny smile appearing on his blood-slicked face. His hair was matted with bodily fluids. Chunks of brains and bone rested in the tangled mess like dandruff. The white of Jake’s eyes stood out through the gore. Ben closed his, waiting to feel the warmth of holding his son again.
Once in range, Ben reached out, wrapping his arms around him. He hugged him with all of his might, so hard that he expected Jake to protest. But he didn’t. Jake hugged him back, repeating the words, “I missed you, Daddy,” over and over again.
Blood smeared Ben’s face, stained his relatively spotless clothes, but he didn’t care. The cozy sensation from holding Jake felt too good.
Suddenly, Jake pulled back. He looked his father in the eyes, smiling. “Want to meet my friends?” Jake asked. “They’re really cool.”
“Sure, Jakester.”
A horde of dead men and woman appeared in a circle around them instantly. Their appearances mirrored Jake’s, but most of them were worse. Flaps of skin dangled from their faces. Broken bones protruded through their thin, colorless skin. Some of the walking corpses were missing appendages.
Ben didn’t recoil. He didn’t run. He stared at his son confoundedly, awaiting answers to questions that went unasked.
“They’re my family now. Not you.”
“No, Jake,” Ben said. “No. I’m your family.”
Ben noticed one corpse in the crowd moving toward the front of the pack. Jake’s mother. Melissa walked toward them, weaving her way through the dead concourse. She groaned, reminding Ben vaguely of the times he’d been inside her. The noises associated with love-making were disturbingly similar. She pursed her lips back, displaying two rows of rotted teeth and black gums. She was holding the hand of another zombie, whose face was so badly decayed it was unrecognizable. Fuck buddy, Ben thought, as the circle enclosed on them.
“Join us, Daddy?” Jake asked. “Won’t you?”
“Sure, Jake. Anything for you.”
And as the famished monsters reached for him, Jake put his mouth on his father’s neck, and tore a hunk of meaty flesh—
Ben awoke abruptly, snapping out of the horrific nightmare. He realized he had awakened inside a new one. The concrete floor was cold beneath him. The room was dank and smelled like urine, as well as other unknown pungent odors. He glanced around, surveying several unfamiliar faces, and the four he had been with before he ended up…
Where am I? Ben asked himself.
“Welcome to Hell, mister,” the black man in the cage next to him said. He had his arm around a young man, whom Ben assumed was his son. They were sitting, backs propped against the heavily-textured stucco wall.
“Where are we?” Ben asked, looking at Josh, who had been tossed in the cage across from him.
“The basement. Motherfuckers duped us,” Josh told him.
“You,” a man uttered contemptuously. He was kneeling on the floor, in the same cage as Ben, pressing his face against the chain-linked prison bars. His face was badly cut, blood had dried in streaks on his cheeks. The victim of a few angry tree branches perhaps. His shirt had holes big enough to be fingered and his slacks shared a similar story. He was dirty. Smelled bad. Much worse than the other dozen prisoners. “I… know you,” he said to Josh.
“Excuse me?” Josh said.
“You’re Josh Emberson, right?”
Josh looked at the man, shaking his head. “Look, man—” And then it hit him like a swift kick in the crotch. It was his eerily familiar face, one Josh wasn’t particularly fond of. “Well, I’ll be damned.”
“It’s me. John Vander. Olivia’s father.”
“Yeah, I almost didn’t recognize you without your glasses and those cuts and bruises.” Olivia flashed into his mind, as she seldom did those days. Her nearly-perfect naked body. Her sweet smile. The magic tricks she could do with her tongue. “Where’s Olivia?” Josh asked, although deep down, he knew.
John Vander shook his head, his glassy eyes telling the whole story. “She didn’t make it. We were driving back from June’s mother’s house when these psychos abducted us. They… I don’t know what they did with Olivia and her mother. But… those bastards told me they didn’t make it.”
“Shit.” Josh took another moment to reflect on the good times he had with his ex-girlfriend. The drugs. The sex. The unfathomable sensation of mixing those two things together. “How long have you been in here?”
“A week.”
“I’ve been here four days,” a man sporting a trucker hat said. He was in the cage to Ben’s right, alone. Ben noticed a burgundy stain on the concrete next to where the man sat. He assumed it wasn’t spilled wine. The stain looked weeks old and the truck driver didn’t appear to be wounded. “They took me at a truck stop in Voorhees.”
“They took us out of our homes,” a woman in her forties said. She was with her son, a twenty-something year old. “Three days ago.” She had an accent that wasn’t quite southern, but not Jersey either.
“We need to get out of here,” Ben said. “And soon.” He recalled what he had been told right before the attack.