The shotgun lay on the floor next to me. I had my hand resting on the stock and the wood grew warm under my touch. Two days ago – hell, not even 48 hours ago – I’d never fired a shotgun before. Now it felt like the exact right thing to be in my hand and it was the most comfortable thing in the world to me. It was me and my shotgun against the world.
And against all my friend’s heads, let’s not forget that.
I thought I heard a rustling of a blanket behind me but when I turned my head there was nothing there. It was just my mind playing tricks on me. Fannie Mae was dead. I knew that. I was a hundred percent positive of that, actually. Her brains were splattered all over the wall, weren’t they?
I turned back to the window with that false smile on my face. Mustn’t think about that.
Still staring at the sun I managed to pull the shotgun into my lap, resting the butt against the floor. My arm throbbed as a reminder but I ignored it. The pain was shelved in a far recess of my mind. I had to change the angle of the shotgun where it rested on the floor and scoot it out another few inches to be able to rest my chin comfortably on the barrel. I thought about getting a chair out of the kitchen and sitting on it to give myself a better angle but I didn’t want to miss even one second of this fabulous sunrise.
I pumped the shotgun, my arm throbbing again from the strain of flexing it. The bullet had passed right through the fleshy part of the arm and any movement stretched it in different ways. Again, I ignored it.
It was a weird angle to try to get my finger into the trigger guard and I realized why a lot of people use their toe for the job. It takes a lot of stretching to get that angle right, but I’d have to put the gun down to go back and take my shoes and socks off and I didn’t know if I’d have the guts to pick it back up. I finally managed to get just the tip of my forefinger in there and decided that would have to be enough.
Then I waited. I wanted to watch the rest of this, my first and last sunrise.
A shadow flitted across the window and cut off my sunlight for a moment as a zombie stumbled by. It dragged its hand against the metal of the trailer and the rasp it made brought goosebumps to my flesh. It passed me on by, ignoring the trailer as it went on in search of food. I guess I wasn’t making enough of a racket or wasn’t alive enough for them to consider me food right now.
But that shadow made a thought start circulating in my head. I tried to push it away but it insisted on being heard. I sighed and let it show me what it wanted.
A vision of the zombie plague crossing the Earth. A shambling army of the dead making their way slowly and inexorably from city to city, town to town. They could be contained now, while their numbers were still relatively small, but once the food supply was gone and they went on their numbers would increase exponentially. All it would take would be the downfall of one relatively middle sized town for them to have enough numbers to be able to take over America, and then the world. And they’d break free, I knew they would. For all I knew I was the last living survivor of the outbreak and the irony of me having been the cause of it all wasn’t lost on me. Soon they would spread and eat their way to the end of the world.
The zombies felt no pain, no fear, and no shame. They didn’t need rest and would never stop. How could an army of men with puny weapons ever stop an onslaught of creatures like that?
I didn’t know if I really cared whether that happened or not. The only people I’d ever cared about were dead. One of them was beginning to rot six feet behind me and the other was out there shambling around in search of food.
But that was something I could bring myself to care about. Screw the rest of the world and their problems. Maybe it was my fault and I was the cause, but what could I do to fix all that? But my best friend Barrett? I cared about that. I cared about him. I needed to destroy him. Killing him again would take away another piece of myself that I could never get back, just like killing Fannie Mae had done, but I knew it had to be done.
I slowly removed my finger from the trigger and lowered the shotgun to the floor.
And after Barrett I needed to kill Mason. Find him, hunt him down, and make him pay for what he’d done to my Fannie Mae.
I looked over at Fannie Mae and that was the first time I noticed the tears streaming down my cheeks. I wiped them away irritably and said a silent promise to her that I’d join her soon. I knew it wasn’t what she would have wanted, but I didn’t want to survive without her.
23.
I upended the sports bag over the couch, emptying its meager contents onto the cushions. I tore open the boxes of shells and threw the cardboard absently on the floor behind me as I made a pile of the shells. I patted my pockets and found a couple more and piled them up as well.
They made a very tiny little pile.
A quick count gave me a total of little more than 20 shells. Plus whatever I had in the gun, which I didn’t think was that much. I sighed and loaded the shotgun and then put the rest of the shells in my pockets. It wasn’t near as bulky as it had been last night when I’d done this. When I was done with that I went into the kitchen looking for food. There wasn’t much in there. Fannie Mae’s mom wasn’t really one for stocking up the fridge, but I scrounged and made myself a decent final breakfast.
Every thirty seconds or so I found my eyes starting to travel in the direction of Fannie Mae and I’d have to stop myself with a jolt from looking over at her. I didn’t need or want to see that. That wasn’t how I wanted to remember my sweet Fannie Mae. She was my rock, my angel, she deserved better than to be remembered like that. I finally realized I just needed to get the hell out of there and begin my hunt for Mason and Barrett. Soonest begun, soonest done.
Then I could pull the trigger.
I picked the shotgun up and peeked out the window, making sure that there were no zombies hovering around the door. The coast was clear so I finally took a deep breath, steadied myself, and opened it. The light was like razors poking my eyeballs after being in the dark tomb of Fannie Mae’s trailer for so long. I held a hand up to shade them and said a prayer that they’d adjust quickly. Last thing I needed was to be taken out by a zombie while waiting for my eyes to adjust.
They finally did and I brought the shotgun to my shoulder, ready to blast anything that was coming for me. But there was nothing. The Acres looked like a ghost town. All was silent in the land of the dead. No dogs barking (what the hell had happened to all the dogs, anyway? I later found out they’d all gone crazy and run away early Saturday morning), no children playing, no cars screeching by, no radios blaring. I expected to see a tumbleweed come blowing by, but of course none did. I saw a couple zombies off in the distance shuffling through the dirt but none of them were close to me and they didn’t even bother to look my way.
I walked out to the middle of the street, the silence and the sun rising making me feel like I was in the middle of a Western. I felt like calling out to Mason, but I knew (hoped) that he wouldn’t answer. If he was intelligent enough to answer to his name then my limited knowledge of zombies would be completely blown out of the water. I looked around the Acres, uselessly wondering what to do next when I noticed my trailer.