Zocopalypse (Death Fields 1)

“It’s empty. We can.”

“How do you know?” I ask.

“I checked.”

I don’t believe her but at the same time anyone in the house would have heard me and the Eater fighting. It’s late, dark and the exposure of being outside freaks me out. Lacking any other option we go inside.

We enter a small room in the back of the house, closed up and dark. There’s another door that leads inside. It’s already shut but Mom secures the locks, pushing an ironing board across the door as well. That’s where we hole up, next to the washing machine and twenty cans of cat food.

“So I guess now I’m a murderer,” I say leaning back against the dryer. The metal flexes against my weight.

“No, you aren’t a murderer,” my mother says, while smoothing my hair out of my face. She pours a small amount of water on a (maybe) clean cloth and begins wiping my face. Dark red stains seep into the fabric. Gross. Eater guts. On my face.

“You and I both know th

ose people aren’t really dead,” I say.

“They may as well be,” she says pushing and pulling at my skin. “It’s not like you had much choice.”

My mother the rationalizer can even make me feel okay about my first kill. It’s not just a character trait. It’s a superpower. The Rationalizer. Her cape would be made out of a sleeping bag, with a fluffy pillow attached.

“Why did the end of the world have to happen during the hottest time of the year,” I grumble taking a small sip of water from my bottle. The room is stifling hot, but I’m afraid to venture further into the house. I know there’s at least one other dead body in there and I have little desire to see it.

“I wasn’t sure how this was going to end,” she says, shifting my face left to right with her hand on my chin, inspecting. “But now I think we’ll make it. I think we will get to the cabin and find your father.”

“Why?”

“Because every day we do something we think we can’t. We walk a little farther. We find food and water. Shelter. We’re not afraid to do what we have to—at least you aren’t.”

“I’m not sure I agree on that,” I say feeling increasingly unstable. The hot room. The sticky blood. The metal head I just decapitated outside. All of it is starting to completely fuck with my head.

But I don’t say that. I keep that to myself and instead say, “You’re getting better at this too.”

She smiles and continues to rub the blood out of my hair. I can tell it makes her happy to have a job—a motherly job. It’s the least I can do.

“There,” she says satisfied with the cleanup. She then makes her little pillow out of her sweatshirt and lies down next to a stack of cans with little gray and white cat faces staring at us in the glare of our flashlight. She closes her eyes and like that, she’s asleep.

Rest doesn’t come as easy for me, even in the seemingly safe room. Something about this whole place makes me nervous. The video and the chained up Eater. It feels off—weird and the feeling in the pit of my stomach coils tight like a warning.

Was the whole thing intentional or did we just stumble into another horrific example of collateral damage? It’s impossible to know and frankly we won’t know more until daylight. God knows what will be waiting for us outside.

I click off my flashlight and listen, faintly hearing the sounds of Roger Upton filter through the door. I don’t want to find comfort in his words but I do. He’s a talisman from the life before. When we held on to a glimmer of hope. Where the warm blue light of the TV made me feel safe. I take a deep breath and strain my ears, listening to his words, allowing them to soothe me.

It’s crazy. I feel crazy, but at the moment it’s all I have.

Chapter Forty-Three

~Now~

From the bed I hear Cole fill a plastic cup with water from the sink. He brings it to me, helping me to prop myself up on the uncomfortable mattress. A long metal bar jabs into my back but I want to see him when he tells me the full story.

His hands are gentle as he positions me and again he checks the crook of my elbow where the Drones drew the blood. “Cole,” I say trying not to be annoyed. To be honest it’s nice to have someone fuss over me. “Stop procrastinating. Just tell me. What do they want from me? Why all the blood withdrawals?”

He sits back on the floor, knees up, pressing his back to the wall. “I took the job as a basic lab assistant—just to make some extra money during school and get a foot into the research world. Being in Liberia during the Ebola outbreak gave me a crash course in medicine—I wasn’t a doctor yet, but I saw and did things there that would take a lifetime of work to experience here, if ever. What really inspired me though, was finding a cure—the research side. Watching those people succumb to this terrible disease made me want to stop it at the source.”

He takes a deep breath before continuing, “Getting an assistant position with your father was huge—but you know that. He’s literally the biggest name in parasitology. He’s made amazing strides and it’s no surprise the public and private sector were fighting over him. Unfortunately, the PharmaCorp not only had the money, they had ties to a terrorist group that were willing to risk humankind to further their cause.”

“What do you mean terrorist groups?”