“Corrina!” A muffled shout made it through the door.
“Stan,” Dylan said, disdain in his voice.
Stan was our neighbor two houses down. He liked to over fertilize his lawn, creating pesticide puddles that had made Blitz sick once. I’d said something to Stan about it, but I guess in such a nice, subtle way, he had acted as if I had made up the excuse just to talk to him.
Dylan had not been so subtle.
“We have to let him in,” I said.
“The hell we do,” Dylan said.
“Dylan.”
“I’ll look,” Jane said, walking back to the front door.
Dylan and I hovered behind her as she peered through the eye hole.
“Corrina! You in there?” Stan yelled.
Jane turned around. “He’s alone.”
Dylan raised the gun.
“Open it up then,” I said.
Jane shifted the bat to her right hand and opened the door.
Stan looked at the three of us, his face flushed. I almost laughed at how piggish the red made his cheeks look. Stan was very fit for a man in his late forties. He liked to talk about how often he worked out and how many miles he’d run over the weekend. His cologne always gave away his presence.
It swamped me now—that newly revamped, Old Spice musk. The front pocket of his shirt was torn and a smudge of dirt marred his khaki pants, but his oiled brown shoes still looked untouched. He could probably have any woman his age. He preferred to chase women twenty years younger than him instead.
“You coming in or not?”Dylan said.
“Dylan,” I said again, but he ignored me.
Stan’s regained control. “I’ve come to save you. The whole block is overrun so I’ve decided to save the lot of you—whether you deserve it or not.”
Stan glanced at Dylan while he said this last bit, then looked at the gun still pointed at his chest. “You don’t want my help, that’s fine. But you should know, there are no police in sight and they killed Mrs. Crozier on her front porch. They’re—”
He shook his head.
“—You don’t need to know what they did. But here’s what you do need to know: I’m getting out of here. Corrina, you were always the nicest to me in the neighborhood, and that might not mean much to some people, but it matters to me. So, I came to see if you needed help, but we have to leave right now.”
He pivoted without waiting for an answer and hurried back to Luna—his luxury RV. He'd parked it halfway up our lawn. He liked to tell us how Luna cost more than the median American home and how he planned to sell his house and go RVing around the country, maybe even dip into Central America, meet lots of women on the road, throw off all responsibilities.
Dylan called it Stan’s mid-life crisis on wheels. I called it a rich man’s pedophile van. Jane had laughed and said rich was right—she’d peeked in the window and seen granite flooring and white leather bench seats.
I figured the story about Mrs. Crozier being dead couldn’t be true. No way that cranky old widow opened the door to some strange men, not when she kept the chain on even when Dylan and I visited.
Breaking glass sounded from across the street, from Mr. Sidner’s place. He lived alone with his two golden retrievers with the sore paws.
A woman standing on his porch had smashed her hands through his front window.
“Hey!” I shouted, moving out the door and across the lawn. Fog swirled dense in the sky and in all directions, creating a sort of bubble. There was Luna, the brilliant green of the grass, the open street, Mr. Sidner’s porch.
“You get away!”
Didn’t matter if the woman was crazy or sick. Mr. Sidner should be left alone with his two dogs and the memory of his dead wife.
The front door opened and Mr. Sidner appeared, trying to reason with the woman. She removed her bleeding hands from the broken window, let out a scream, grabbed Mr. Sidner by the shoulders and tossed him down the steps onto his lawn.
I sprinted across the street, made it to the other side, and tripped on a cracked piece of pavement. I went down hard on one knee but bounced back up. I crossed the last few feet at a galloping limp and prayed I hadn’t fractured anything.
Mr. Sidner grappled with a woman who looked to be in her twenties. He was beneath her and both pairs of feet pointed at me so that I could make out plenty of strange details. She was supposed to be another escaped hospital patient, or maybe a homeless woman, or a drug addict. But she wore a pastel blue pencil skirt, torn pantyhose, black, low-heeled pumps. A piece of pink gum was stuck to the bottom of her right shoe.
Mr. Sidner screamed.
I dropped the knife and barreled into the woman’s backside, sending both of us flying.
The fog-soaked grass wet my clothes and chilled my bones. The pain in my knee flared up and I stared at the white blankness of sky and waited for the dizziness to pass.
The woman’s face was less than a foot away from mine. She must have been unconscious, her eyes were closed and she didn’t move except for what looked like some sort of involuntary twitching. Blood covered her exposed skin—I feared I’d done that, face-planted her into a rock or something. Her breath stank of rotting food. Her hair was a ratty brown, her white-ruffled shirt had torn, exposing a matching blue bra, and there were bite marks up one arm and purplish bruising around her neck, as if someone had choked her.
“Corrina?” Dylan’s voice.
“I’m okay,” I said shakily.
“You shouldn’t have done that,” Dylan said.
I ignored what was usually an opening line to one of our arguments and tried to still the dizziness in my head. “Is Mr. Sidner okay?”
Silence.
“He’s dead. It looks like she…broke his neck.”
I closed my eyes and forced myself not to throw up. When I opened them, the young woman twitched again. “I don’t know what I did to her. I only pushed her—”
She opened her eyes. Bloodshot eyes. Blown pupils.
Dylan lifted me up and dragged me backward across the lawn.
“What’s going on?” Stan bellowed from across the street. A car alarm started blaring. A low boom echoed down the block, setting off more alarms.
Dylan stumbled on the same piece of sidewalk as me and unbalanced us both. I dropped to my hurt knee. The woman teetered to a standing position on her black pumps and then fixated on me.
“Uh,” I said, and then air rushed past me. Stan ran toward the woman, Jane’s bat in hand, and slugged her on the side of the head. She toppled over Mr. Sidner’s body.
I placed both palms flat on the grass and puked my heart out. It wasn’t much since we’d never gotten around to breakfast. Next to my pitiful pile of vomit, I saw my knife. I picked it up. This was supposed to be a street of people who held petty grievances against each other about tree pruning, lawn watering and dog walking.
“That’s right,” Stan screamed at the woman’s unconscious form. He waved the bat around.
Dylan helped me up. Stan tucked the bat under his arm and supported my other side.
“Let’s get you inside Luna,” Stan said.
“It’s just a bruise. I can walk. Give me fifteen minutes for the sting to wear off and I’ll be able to run,” I said.
“We don’t have fifteen minutes,” Dylan said quietly. “The fog is making it difficult to see, but I'm pretty sure there are more.”
Shadows continued to move in the fog, just far enough to stay indistinct, to maybe believe it was my imagination. Two, three, a dozen, there was no way to know.
Jane waited inside Luna and secured the door after we entered. She tilted her head to the window. “Stan was right. They took out Mrs. Crozier too.”
I didn't want to look. My eyes skipped to the sycamore trees lining the street. They were taller than most of the houses with roots strong enough to have cracked almost every section of sidewalk, except for the mulberry tree that Stan nubbed into a garish skeleton every year because he thought the leaves were too much trouble.
If you stood in the middle of Grove Street on a sunny day the trees combined overhead into a beautiful canopy, with trunks you couldn’t fully reach around, with limbs grown into a complex system of crooked mazes, with leafy crowns that didn’t quite meet each other across the road.
This neighborhood was supposed to make things right again.
“Corrina,” Dylan gently shook my shoulder. “Don’t ever do that again. What were you thinking?”
“Stop it, Dylan,” I said, knowing I was taking out my sadness on him, but not being able to stop myself. “Don’t treat me like I can’t take care of myself. I did just fine before you came along.”
He looked away from me.
The bench rocked under me as Stan took off down the street. The rumble of the road and the engine soothed me, but did nothing to release the tension in Dylan's face.
I sighed. “You take risks, too. Mr. Sidner needed our help.” My stomach roiled as if thinking about cramping again. “But we didn’t help him.”
Luna made a wide turn. My stomach flipped and the dizziness came back. I focused on a potted cactus sitting on the back of the opposite bench. Stan turned again and the cactus moved an inch. I grabbed for the pot before it fell.
“How’s your knee?” Dylan asked quietly.
I thought about his question for a long second and then my mind tripped away into a different thought. “Sidner’s dogs! Wait, Stan, we have to go back for them!”
I rushed to the driver’s seat, but my shoes slipped on the granite floor and I went down hard on my tailbone and jammed my knife wrist on the side of a cabinet. The pain seared away the rest of my dizziness.
“No way!” Stan whirled the steering wheel counterclockwise, forcing my forehead into the bench siding. “Those dogs are dead, dead, dead. What do you think made me bring out Luna?”
Dylan helped me onto the bench. “Just sit here for a minute, Corrina. Please.” He stood behind Stan and grabbed the back of the chair. His other hand held the gun like it was part of his body now. “Take us back out by your house. That’s the quickest way out of the neighborhood.”
“I know it. You think I don’t know that?” Stan gunned the engine. “I came to save you when I could have just left. You don’t need to tell me.”
People ran around—none of them our neighbors. They crossed in front of us and then disappeared in bushes or behind trees or jumped fences, or vanished into the fog. Dozens of shapes in motion. And another dozen shapes, people-size, lay still in front yards, across porch steps, along the sidewalk. Our neighborhood looked ransacked, pillaged, looted, and now the survivors were abandoning it, letting the weeds grow unchecked, leaving the doors left ajar, the lights on, the alarms ringing.
A thick column of smoke rose a block away, transforming the fog into a poisonous brown. No police or firefighters were in sight. Would the entire neighborhood burn? I almost said we needed to go back for the Corrina CD, for the computer hard drive with all our files, for the picture of my parents, for Blitz’s collar.
Stan turned Luna onto the outlet street. I remained silent. I would not be that person—the one who puts those she loves in danger because of things that don’t matter. I had Dylan and Jane with me. No thing could be more important than them.
Jane moved to the passenger seat and placed the blood-stained bat across her lap. Luna’s windows were meant to showcase beautiful mountain vistas and long stretches of prairie hills, but now they gave a panoramic view of the destruction. Even inside Luna with all the windows closed, everything sounded wrong. Sirens, alarms, rumblings, and booms like the last time a transformer had exploded on our street, sounds like gunfire, and the screech and crash of cars colliding.
And yet it was otherworldly too, sounds that drifted in through the fog, detached from sight, like an old radio drama. No picture, only sound and imagination, which felt somehow worse.
Dylan turned to me, his face whitewashed and sallow, the stubble standing out. “There’s a girl,” he said. He nodded through the window. “That girl who moved in with her uncle last week, same age as Krista.”
Krista, his dead sister. It’s part of what had connected us at first, being in the club with other people who’d lost loved ones.
“Let’s go get her,” I said without a second thought.
“We don’t even know her.” Stan whipped his head around, then turned back to the windshield. “She’s some Pakistani or something, just moved in. Don’t think she even speaks English. Besides, Luna doesn’t like backing up or making u-turns. Better just to keep moving.”
“Just stop then,” Dylan said.
“She could be like them,” Jane said. “She could be crazy like the others.”
I refrained from shouting at Jane to shut up. Didn’t she know how deep a trigger Krista was for Dylan? Instead, I focused on what might convince Stan to stop. “I thought you came to save us,” I said, knowing it was a lame attempt as soon as the words came out.
“Yeah, you…” He glanced back at Dylan. “All of you. Because you’re my neighbors and all, and you treated me right.”
“Stop, Stan.” Dylan’s voice was pitched low.
My panic increased, something that should have been impossible with the day’s trauma. But Dylan never used that tone of voice, not unless he was thinking about the drunk driver who had murdered Krista while Dylan had been driving, about the helplessness he felt being unable to save her, about how if he had just been a few seconds slower or faster that everything would have turned out different.
Dylan raised the gun. A silent scream mounted in my brain. Dylan wouldn’t do anything that crazy. Except, I wasn’t totally sure.
I grabbed my knife off the floor, pushed Dylan aside and pressed the blade into Stan’s throat. The adrenaline made me lose all feeling in my hand so that I wasn't sure how hard I was pressing. “Stop, Stan.”
Stan’s eyes bulged, but he kept driving. “Come on, Corrina. Don’t play stupid now. Me and Luna will take care of you.”
“Stan,” I said.
“I know you don’t have it in you,” Stan said.
“You don’t know me,” I said, letting my fear of Dylan’s gun dig the blade in a little deeper. Not enough to break skin, but enough for him to notice. “You don’t know the trouble I got into when I was in school. You don’t know how well I know how to use this knife. You don’t know how much it pisses me off to hear you want to leave that girl behind because she’s Pakistani. I’m Egyptian, Stan. What do you think about me?”
“You’re not Egyptian. Where’s your accent? Sure, you tan real nice, but you didn’t come from any foreign country.”
“The girl could be like them,” Jane said.
I stared at Jane and the coldness that had entered her hazel eyes. “The only way to know,” I said, driving ice into every word, “is if we stop and find out. Otherwise, we’re leaving a defenseless little girl to die.”
Stan kept driving.
If I didn’t follow through now it would be as if we crowned him king of the RV. And then there was what Dylan would do.
Stan was calling my bluff, and I knew, just as surely as I’d known in school before a fight—it was always better to take the first punch. Most people saw it as an act of courage. I knew it for what it was—an act of desperation. Can’t take the beating, too afraid to turn the other cheek, so you hide behind violence and act like you asked for it.
“Stan.” I held my breath and nicked his neck with my knife.
Stan slapped a hand to the bleeding scratch. His eyes rolled into the back of his head and he slammed on the brakes. I tumbled forward. The steering wheel punched me in the chest.
“Back up, people!” He licked his lips. “I saved you all, didn’t I? I’m all about saving people.” His knuckles turned white on the steering wheel.
I coughed. Blood dripped down Stan’s neck and disappeared into his shirt collar.
I had done that.
I had never done that before.
“I just want to be careful about it,” Stan said. “What if it’s Ebola or rabies or something? You don’t want to catch it. You want the girl so bad? All right. I’ll turn at this roundabout.” Luna teetered a bit as he sped around the circle.“But we’ve got to get out of here.”
“We will,” Dylan said. “After we get her on board.” His voice sounded strained, but I dared to look at him now. He pointed the gun at the floor.
“It’s not Ebola,” I said. “That makes people sick. Not violent.”
Stan shook his head. “Doesn’t matter what it is. It’s here and that means we shouldn’t be.”
The girl, wearing a pink hoodie and jeans, stood in the middle of the street a few yards away, the fog closing in behind her like a curtain. She must have run after us.
Her eyes were big and round, examining our faces through the windshield. “Are you normal?” She yelled, the windshield glass muffling her voice.
My breath quickened as I wondered what she meant. She pulled the sleeves of her hoodie down to cover her hands as if she were cold. She looked to be only thirteen years old. Skinny and short and trying not to show her fear by standing as tall as possible in front of a giant RV with the sounds of the whole world falling apart surrounding her.
I stood by the side door and opened it to a clear street, except for three figures mostly obscured by the fog further down the block.
Dylan pushed open a side window and waved at the girl. “We’re your neighbors on Grove Street. Get in here.”
She appeared, small and scared, like a rabbit. She dashed through the door, skidded on the granite floor, and fell onto the dining bench with a big, gulping breath.
Dylan closed the window. “Get going, Stan. There are three coming our way.”
“So how come she’s okay and not those three?” Jane demanded. “Or are we letting those three in too?”
“Look at them and look at her,” I said. “Can’t you just tell?”
They were close enough to make out details in the fog now. A brown-haired woman, dressed as if she had just gone to the mall. She wore cowboy boots and I watched as one of them caught on the asphalt and forced her to her knees. The two men seemed to be together. Like coworkers just getting off from a construction work site. All three had blank gazes when they opened their eyes, and all three cradled or cocked their heads as if enduring a great deal of pain.
One of the men frothed saliva at the mouth. The woman’s muscles spasmed, interfering with her ability to walk in a straight line. They seemed drawn to Luna’s engine noise, or our voices, or I don’t know. Something about them looked so, disturbed, so angry. And they were making their way down the street fast, faster than I would have thought possible with their loping, crippled gaits.
“Shut the door, Corrina,” Dylan said.
“There’s got to be something we can do to help them. Something…”
Dylan wrapped his hand over mine and pulled the door closed. Stan went through the roundabout again and we rumbled down the street.
The shapes disappeared into the whiteness like vanishing ghosts.
“Maybe once we can figure out what’s going on,” Dylan said, “but we can’t risk—”
“I know,” I said, remembering Mr. Sidner. Were they part of some sick gang? They couldn’t all be from the mental health institution, especially since these three looked as if they had just walked off their jobs.
The girl hunched over the bench,. Her sweatshirt failed to hide her trembling.
“I’m Corrina,” I said. “This is Dylan, Stan, and Jane,” I pointed to each person in turn. “You’re safe here.”
“I’m Maibe.” She pushed back her hood. “My name is Egyptian for grave because my mother died giving birth to me and my father sent me away to my uncle,” she said. “We just moved here, but the zombies killed him and now I’m alone.”
All of us stared.
“Oh wow, this is just great,” Jane said.
Maibe rolled up the sleeves of her pink hoodie, and her arms were skinny things. Two gold-colored bangles clinked together on her left wrist. Her hoodie revealed dark, thick hair pulled back into a ponytail with a matching pink band.
“Maibe,” I said. “These people are sick with something. Something mental, or on drugs, or…” I looked to Dylan for help.
He sat across from her and carefully folded his hands onto the tabletop. He stared at Maibe for a second and then looked away. He always handled kids like this. He was careful not to make them anxious by invading their space. “Maibe,” he said quietly. “Sometime people are capable of horrible, monstrous things—”
“No. That’s not what’s happening,” she said.
I opened my mouth to contradict her. Dylan gave me a warning look.
“Maibe,” Dylan said. “Did you see what happened to your uncle?”
She nodded. “He went outside to scare off the zombies, but they killed him in our backyard.” She stared at the table and fiddled with her bracelets. She rubbed hard at her eyes. “I was scared. I didn’t think I would be. It’s not like that in the movies. I wasn’t ready, so I ran and hid behind that big flower bush in the front yard, that’s when I saw you all drive by.”
“It’s okay, you’re safe here,” Dylan said.
I could tell Maibe didn’t buy into his comfort. I didn’t. We were a long way from safe, but if we could escape the neighborhood, find a fire station, call the police, maybe we could get some answers at least. “Does anyone have a working phone?” I asked.
“No good,” Stan yelled. “I tried a dozen times.”
“We just need to try again,” Dylan said.
“Phones are gone,” Maibe said. “My uncle and I have been watching…We just didn’t think it would spread so fast. We were planning to leave tomorrow. Thought we had plenty of time. The zombies only now got to us, but they took over most of downtown last night.”
“If you don’t shut up with that crazy talk, I’ll throw you back out with the crazies,” Stan said. He didn’t bother turning around, but Jane did and the look on her face said she agreed with Stan.
I didn’t understand how she could be so callous. “Jane.”
She shook her head and turned away.
“How do you know all this?” Dylan said.
“My uncle listens…listened to the police scanners. It was bad all night.”
“What was bad?” Dylan asked.
“Fires and murders and stuff.”
“Why are you calling them zombies?” He asked like he was talking to a butterfly.
She shrugged and looked at Dylan with her huge brown eyes. Serious, in control of herself again. “What else would you call them?”
“Sick,” I said.
“It doesn’t matter,” Jane said. “They’re trying to kill us. That’s what matters.”
I tugged on Dylan’s arm. “Stay here,” I said to Maibe. I pulled Dylan into Stan’s little bedroom of love. That was the only way to describe the red satin sheets, incense holder, and the huge mirror hung on one wall. This room made my skin crawl, which was a pretty amazing accomplishment considering all that had happened.
“This is nuts,” Dylan said.
I could see our profiles in the mirror. Both of us looked paler than usual, though Dylan looked downright ghostly next to me. He always turned pale and red when he got scared, while I turned pale and yellow. I was shorter than Dylan and Jane, not short, just shorter. The top of my head hit the bottom of Dylan’s chin. I began tucking in my flyaway hairs as if the act might magically make everything normal again.
Dylan laid his hand on my arm to make me stop.
I sighed. “What should we do?”
“Obviously the girl is in shock. We just have to be careful with her.”
“She’s a kid who watched her uncle murdered. Why are Stan and Jane being so harsh?”
“I don’t know.” He turned the knob to go back out, then drew me close to his chest so that I could feel the warmth of his body and the beat of his heart. “We need to get hold of the authorities and figure out what’s going on.”
“There’s so many of them,” I said.
“I know. Look, before we go back I want to tell you—”
“I love you too—”
“—You’ve got to be more careful.”
Embarrassment flushed my cheeks and a spark of anger lit inside my chest.
“Considering whether to help the intruder at our patio door, and then running after Mr. Sidner, and then thinking, for even a second, about helping those other three? You’re risking yourself for strangers trying to kill us.”
“And what about Maibe?” I tried not to raise my voice.
“I know, I know.” He brushed a strand of hair off my forehead. I imagined slapping his hand away.
“I’m not saying we shouldn’t help people, but I watched you tackle that woman, and I saw what she had done to Mr. Sidner, and all I could think was that I was about to watch you die, and how…God, I’m not good at this.”
The part of me that didn’t want to slap him wanted to kiss him and forget what was happening for a moment.
But I let that moment pass too.
He pulled me into him and wrapped his arms around me.
“All right,” I said, my words muffled in his shirt. The smells of cotton and his skin enveloped me, comforted me. “I will.” But even as I said the words I remembered too many people who had stood on the sidelines of my life, unwilling to help when I needed it. I would not turn into one of those people.
I felt the door open behind me, startling me with its whoosh of air. Dylan didn’t let go.
Silence. Darkness. The smell of his shirt, the warm dampness of my breath.
“We’re coming up on the fire station.” Jane’s voice.
Dylan let go and I followed him back into the main part of the RV. The bay windows provided a stunning view. Thinning fog, moving shadows, smoke trails, broken glass.
“Why are there no cars on the roads?” I said. But no one answered my question, if they even heard it. I thought I knew the answer anyway. This early in the morning on a foggy Saturday—the streets were usually empty. But surely others had tried to escape?
Jane climbed back into the passenger seat. Dylan and Maibe crowded the driver’s seat. Stan turned the corner. I leaned with Luna’s sway and let out a moan.
“I told you,” Maibe said.
Stan rolled his window down and craned his head out for a better look. The air suddenly filled with the smell of burning plastics. A stench that made my eyes water and blurred my vision. The alarms grew louder, overlapping, grating on me. Booms sounded at random, some far away, some close by.
I stepped forward, the floor slick underneath my shoes. The windshield was grimy and moisture gathered on it. I bent over to peer through. Someone had broken all the windows in the brick station. A person in firefighting gear hung out of a bottom level window, his suit halfway off and his head and torso…bloody. A red fire truck sat part of the way out of the garage, all tires flat. The fog amplified the low roar of Luna’s engine. The fire station alarm came through as a low buzzing underneath the shriek of the car alarms. Something like a shotgun fired. More shots.
“How far away are those?” Jane asked.
“Hard to say with the fog,” Dylan said.
“Turn the radio on,” I said. “Try the radio. Stan, get us out of here. Please close the windows again.”
“But where do we go?” Maibe said. “There won’t be any place safe.”
Jane fiddled with the tuner buttons.
Stan labored to reverse Luna down the street. “There’s a police station about a mile from here,” Stan said.
“This neighborhood is already gone,” Dylan said. “Whatever’s happening is a lot bigger than a gang of sickos taking over a neighborhood.”
“Maybe it is zombies,” Jane said.
Smoke rose from a house down the street, its column of yellow infecting the fog around it. Ours was the only vehicle running, though from the several crashed cars we'd passed, we weren't the only ones who had tried to leave by vehicle.
A large RV, with purple swirls, revving its engine. We were a target for whatever had been let loose here.
“Why hasn’t the National Guard been called in?” Dylan asked. “Where are all the first responders?” He stared out a side window looking like he was memorizing every house, every street, every broken window, trying to x-ray vision what waited. “And where are the ones who did this? Where did they go?”
Maibe turned and looked at me, wide-eyed. “Do you believe me yet?”
My shoulders trembled. My knee ached from my falls. I felt about ready to yell at Maibe myself, and then the tuner picked up a signal.