The North (#wattys2016)

Chapter 20

I blinked. “What do you want us to do with you?”

She shrugged and her eyes slid over to my carbine. “I don’t know … does it matter at this point? We’re all going to be dead soon.”

Cruze shifted herself across the jump seat and leaned in. “That’s a pretty bold statement, Dawn-Marie.”

She rolled her eyes. “Are you people freaking dense? They’re going to find you. They find everyone who isn’t part of Eden. They’ll kill all of us including me.”

I gave her a surprised look. “Why would your security people kill you?”

“Because I’m not dead back at that barricade,” she said flatly.

Wow. I didn’t see that coming.

It didn’t make any sense at all – Dawn-Marie was supposed to be a part of the Eden tribe. If we’d left her at the barricade, she could have provided the patrols with valuable information about our vehicles, weapons and what kind of threat we posed to whoever was in charge. I took another sip of my hot chocolate. At least she was opening up to us.

“What can you tell us about how Eden came to be?” said Cruze as she handed the girl a mug of hot chocolate.

Dawn-Marie blew on the rim of the cup for a moment and took a small sip. “Our farm was about five miles outside of Dinsmore,” she began. “Just Mom, Dad and me and my brother Darcy. He’d turned eighteen the week before everything went to hell. We first heard about the outbreaks on the dish … you know, the satellite TV?”

I nodded. “Go on.”

She took another drink and resumed her gazing at the rear doors. “My father decided it was time to take steps to protect ourselves – when the Internet died. TV and radio had stopped broadcasting for a couple of days by then but we still had power from a backup generator as well as an Internet connection. It’s weird how the Internet was the last thing to break down. We followed the outbreak through social media – Twitter offered minute by minute updates from people who were trapped in cities and towns worldwide. Mom got infected when she and Dad went into Dinsmore to get provisions. The village was alive with the creatures – Dad said she was attacked inside the truck. He got her home but she bled to death on the way.  My brother tried to stop Dad from shooting her, but she turned right in front of us. The thing she became … it was savage. It was like her memory had been wiped and her mind had been replaced with some kind of feral madness … but you know what I’m talking about. You’ve seen it. Dad shot her in the head and we burned her body. That was almost six months ago.”

I gulped back the last mouthful of hot chocolate from my tin cup, and wiped it out with a rag. Dawn-Marie looked like all of us - disheveled and carrying a thousand yard stare from walking on egg shells the better part of a year. I’d seen that look before, in pictures of soldiers at the front during the Second World War and in some of the men from the King’s Own who’d returned from Afghanistan.

She had a scar over her left eyebrow that looked to be still healing and I noticed the stitches she’d been received were a hell of a mess – like someone had closed the wound with a sewing needle and thread.

Dawn-Marie had given us her personal story of surviving those first terrifying days, but I was no closer to learning about Eden, who ran it and what kind of threat that it posed. And we didn’t have time to take a trip down memory lane either. I wanted to find out as much as possible as quickly as possible and get our carriers the hell off Eden land, so I decided to take the direct approach.

“How soon after Day Zero did Eden start to take shape?” I asked, hoping she wouldn’t tell me to go to Hell again.

She avoided my gaze for a short moment and that’s when I realized she was ready to tell me what I needed to hear. “Eden was an idea that made sense when everything was insane, okay? After Mom died, we fought daily battles against the monsters. We’d drive around in Dad’s pickup and shoot the creeps as soon as we saw them – we eventually ran out of ammunition for Dad’s hunting rifles, and we had to rely on smashing their heads in. Dad was killed two months ago clearing a farmhouse. Darcy got infected and had to be put down. I was on my own for a week when Sunray’s people found me. After that, everything changed.”