Gabriela’s got Jack on the potty and she’s already pulling on her yoga pants and sneakers for their morning walk before she remembers morning walks are not happening anymore. She’s trying to decide whether she wants to brave taking Jack four doors up the road for playgroup anyway when she hears something upstairs, something like footsteps, something not like footsteps. The not-footsteps approach the basement door, begin descending, slow, uncertain, like whoever it is remembers there being something down here, something worth coming down the stairs for, but couldn’t quite remember what it was or why they wanted it to start with. But since she had Jack and moved from her childhood bedroom down to the finished basement where there was room for his stuff, her parents never come downstairs that early in the morning, not when Jack might still be sleeping.
"Mom?" she says, uncertain.
Then another sound comes from midway up the stairs, a sound like maybe someone gargling mouthwash, only it sounds thicker than mouthwash, and it’s like they’re trying to talk through it, except that it keeps sloshing out when they try.
For about two seconds she deliberates, hand held out to the door. Then her flight instinct starts firing, that pressure in the small of her back starts shooting through to her navel, her legs start tensing, and the next thing she knows she’s got the backpack on one shoulder, Jack hoisted on the other, and she’s taking the back door sideways, awkward, and it’s hitting her in the ass on her way out, just like the saying says not to.
She’s forgotten Jack’s backpack, all his board books, Dr. Seuss and Goodnight Moon and The Very Hungry Caterpillar. She wonders how the hell she’s supposed to get him to sleep now.
Now she’s got Jack on her shoulders and going as slow as she can along the treeline back of town, staying off the roads, keeping a clear line of sight with the maples at her back. If any of them come up through the woods things’ll get interesting, but the town is by far the greater risk, and besides she’s faster than they are and she’s got Jack as a lookout. They’re playing a game called Who Can Be the Quietest. He wins automatically if he sees anyone and pulls her hair to tell her so.
She’d ventured up into town earlier, hugging the back walls of shopping plazas, looking to replenish her stores. She’d only left home two days ago, but Jack was tearing through his fruit snacks like a machine and there was no power in the universe that could get him to swallow so much as one lousy calorie of an energy bar. She’d come around behind the supermarket and found someone’s legs hanging out of a dumpster, and the puddle on the concrete strongly suggested the rest of that someone was elsewhere. The delivery door was ajar, streaked at shoulder height with what could have been fingerpaint. She opened the knife, got it in a fist at hip level, took two steps for the door, stopped, looked at Jack, looked around and found nowhere safe to put a wanderlusty three-year-old while she went off to get herself killed over fruit snacks. It did not escape her notice that if this were a movie, this would be the Door the Audience Is Telling the Bimbo Not to Go Through. Well, she’s not anybody’s goddamn bimbo. Sorry, kid, she murmured, and tousled his hair as best she could with her knife-hand. I promise I won’t let you starve.
He’s a good kid, her Jack. He didn’t throw a tantrum, hungry as he was. Sometimes she even thinks he understands the depth of shit they’re in, knows not to make it worse.
They moved on.
Now she’s walking beneath the maples and the sunshine and the summer-smell of grass and the roadkill-smell coming off the town, she’s walking and she’s humming softly to Jack to keep his mind off the sounds in the distance, she’s walking and she’s thinking about zombie movies again. Thinking how ridiculous it is that they’re made to be so fast. It doesn’t make any sense. She never could figure out why corpses were supposed to suddenly be faster or stronger than they were in life, like some kind of consolation prize for shambling around with your skin plopping off. She’s read something about how people only use ten percent of their brains while awake, and it’s got her wondering if maybe death—undeath—is supposed to be some kind of loophole that unlocks the other ninety, to let them do ridiculous things like outrun sprinters, chew through walls. She’s thinking about it being June, how infections spread faster in the heat, how dead things decompose faster too. She wonders which happens first.
It’s not just zombie movies. It’s horror stories in general. She remembers back when she first started reading them, huge doorstop anthologies of them that her dad would get at the thrift shop for a dime. She must’ve been ten or so. They scared her sleepless. One thing she got to noticing in them, though, was how if a story was written in present tense then the protagonist probably survived it, unless there was some kind of twist at the end, but if it was written in past tense then the guy was pretty much screwed.
She’s wondering what tense her story’s written in. Whether she dies in the dirt with someone’s face in her guts. Whether she rides off into the sunset. Whether she wakes up and it was all a dream.
She’s wondering where the fuck she’s supposed to go before she gets there.
Now she’s taken to calling him Jack the Snack, because she has to convince herself it’s funny or she’ll go stark raving batshit and there’s no coming back from that. The treeline ran out yesterday and she’s back among the buildings, old brick townhouses with delis on the corners. There are lots of broken windows on the ground floor, trashed and smeared. There’s no glass on the ground. She looks for movement in the windows and sees none. She’s so close to breaking down and screaming, hoping the good guys find her first.
The silence is oppressive. The noises are worse. For two days now she’s smelled fire but can’t find it, fire and a smell like rancid bacon frying. An oily smoke hangs in the air, like what comes out the back door of a diner in July. She’s wearing a hole in her shoe. She’s cut holes in the backpack, one for each of Jack’s legs, and it’s a nice hiking backpack so he’s pretty stable up there, the backpack strapped around her at chest and waist. His bare toes jostle at her ass with every step.
There are two things that keep her going.
One is Jack’s face pressed against the back of her neck. She can’t even complain about the way her shoulders cramp in place to carry him, the way she has to stop every half hour and convince him to pee pottyless, the weight of his heavy little butt on her back. The lack of it would weigh much more.
Two is the perverse hope that she’ll come across someone she knew in high school, any of the girls who called her Slut or Skank or Maternity Leave when her belly started to round out, any of the boys who’d elbow each other and grin when she walked by, any of the teachers who assumed she was stupid because she’d made one bad call, never mind that she was pulling in the top five percent even through the first trimester when she’d puke till she was dizzy, sit and stare at the wall and wait to die. That weight on her arm again, that face at her shoulder. Bad call? Fuck them. She pictures each of them in turn, maybe pulped into warm jelly by infection, maybe uninfected, healthy, and being torn unceremoniously to bits.
It keeps her going, one foot in front of the other. It keeps her from thinking about her fate. About Jack’s. How slow he made her. What would happen when it came to it. Could she let them take him? Could she do it before they got the chance?
You’re going to get us killed, kid, she whispers, and he looks up at her uncomprehending, doesn’t even know what it means for the mosquitoes when she slaps them off his arms, not really, and he nods at her, all solemnity, fruit snacks on his breath.