"Ty? Are we going to go see Nana now?"
Ginny sounded exhausted and I knew that I was. It was dark now. The thought of spending the night in the woods wasn't very appealing, but the thought of us trying to figure out if the situation at the retirement community was safe while we were this tired didn't exactly sound like a good idea, either. Besides, I really didn't have much experience driving at night.
"Ginny," I broached carefully, "I want to see Nana too. But it's been a really big day. Right? You were in school this morning and since then we've escaped town, looted a store, and run over a zombie with a car." I tried to get a smile out of her and was glad to see just a hint of one play around Ginny's mouth.
"What are we going to do, though?" asked Ginny. "Where is it safe?"
I was wondering the same thing. "We could go into the woods and camp out—just for tonight. We do have camping equipment."
"Do you know how to put the tents together? Because I don't," said Ginny.
"The one I took from the garage I could put up in my sleep. But it's a one-person tent. The one I just swiped from Bo is a new tent that might take me a while to figure out. And we're losing light pretty quickly, too," I said, trying to think it through.
"Couldn't you just turn on the van's headlights and set up the tents?" asked Ginny.
I grinned at her. "You're thinking pretty well on your feet, Sis! That's a good idea. The only thing is that I just don't know how far this ... infection ... has spread. We might not want to attract any attention to ourselves with lights. Maybe, just for tonight, we can sleep in the van."
Ginny turned in her seat and looked doubtfully into the back. It was a mess, since I'd just flung stuff in the back in a massive hurry. The third row of seats were down and there was camping stuff and food and water bottles all over the place.
"I can move some things around and make a place for you to lie down. And I'll put the seat all the way back and just sleep in the driver's seat," I said.
Ginny reached over and gave me an unexpected hug. "You're doing a great job, Ty. Better than Mom and Dad would have done."
I felt myself coloring at the praise. I muttered, "Not that great of a job."
"You are. You know how Mom and Dad were."
I did. And it didn't escape my notice that she was talking about them in the past tense. In a lot of ways, that was probably healthy.
I carefully drove the van off the road and through a break in the trees off the rural route highway. I was hoping to conceal it a little from the road so that no one would see us, but vans aren't exactly good off-road vehicles. Moving the stuff around did take a little longer than I thought. But by the time she and I closed our eyes, we were completely exhausted. I fell asleep quickly to the almost immediate sounds of Ginny's regular breathing as she fell into a deep sleep.
I woke up the next morning jerking out of my sleep with a gasp. Life itself was a nightmare right now, and waking up, my situation didn't seem any better than it had in the dream. I checked my watch and saw it was already noon. We'd been tireder than I'd thought. Ginny was still sleeping and I hated waking her up. Maybe I could just start driving and she'd still be able to catch up on sleep.
I needed to use the restroom, though. I smiled at my choice of words. Restroom. Yeah, there weren't too many of those around. I didn't want Ginny to wake up and not find anyone here, so I gently moved to the back of the van and lightly touched her shoulder. She woke with a start, too, just like I had.
"Hey, it's okay," I said. Lying to her, as usual. Things were pretty far from okay. "It's morning, but you can keep sleeping. I just needed to let you know I was going into the woods for a bathroom run."
Ginny's brow crinkled. "Okay. I need to go, too. But I hate going in the woods."
"Not many restrooms around here, Ginny." I shrugged.
"No, I don't mean that. I just mean that it's kind of ... it's scary in the woods." She said the words with hesitation, like she thought I might laugh at her. But I was far from finding anything humorous right now.
"Tell you what. When I come back, I'll just hang out on the edge of the woods in earshot and you can go, okay?"
She nodded, eyes drooping again sleepily.
"Maybe you can even go back to sleep while I'm driving to Nana's," I said lightly.
Ginny smiled at the mention of Nana. "She always has treats for us. Peppermints. And she makes that great pound cake. Do you think she can cook for us? It's been a long time since we've visited."
I was just hoping she hadn't been run out of the place. That she was still there. That I could offload some of this huge responsibility I had to an adult who was related to us. "Sure. You know how much Nana loves cooking for us. And she has a kitchenette on her hall." And she might even have total run of the big kitchen, too, depending on whether the staff deserted them or stayed.
I headed off into the woods after making sure that Ginny had locked the van doors after us. Now that it was daylight, the van was a lot more visible than it had been at night and I was ready to get out of there.
I hadn't gone far into the woods when I heard a soft groaning approaching behind me. My breath caught and I whipped my head around. It was a group of zombies. In fact, it looked like an entire family. A dad in a denim button-down shirt, a mom wearing a cheerful floral dress. Even a little girl in a Disney shirt and a toddler boy wearing overalls. Their eyes were hollow as they gaped at me.
I started backing off. They were slow, I reminded myself. Much slower than I was. But the woods were full of obstacles and I was outnumbered four to one.
The dad clumsily made a swiping motion at me and I scurried back a little. "Ginny!" I called out loudly. "Drive away!" There was no answer and I wasn't sure she could hear me. Had she gone back to sleep?
My heart sank as I heard a rustling behind me. I turned to see another zombie staring at me. That's when I jogged away, heading deeper into the woods. They grunted and jogged awkwardly after me, a good deal faster than Bo had been, but not as fast as me. I stumbled over a root but caught myself before I fell.
I couldn't seem to shake them. They didn't tire. They just blindly headed for me, loping behind me, training hollow eyes on me the whole time. The scariest thing was that they looked so harmless if you didn't see their faces. And that they were so hard to shake off.
I finally stopped panicking and started thinking. It took a while and I was pretty far into the woods at this point. They weren't fast. They were really awkward and hardly sure-footed. I spotted a steep, rocky hill covered with roots. I took a deep breath and sprinted up it and then down the other side. Sure enough, I could hear them muttering and groaning to themselves as they tripped over themselves and the hill. I didn't wait around. I ran as hard and as fast as I could back in the direction of the van. I was so glad I'd left the keys with Ginny. Maybe she drove away. Or maybe I diverted all of the zombies in the area away from her.
My lungs felt as if they were bursting. Running in unfamiliar terrain wasn't easy and I winced as my ankle turned going over a root. But I kept going, heading straight for the direction that I knew the van had to be in.
And it wasn't there. I looked frantically around me. But this had been where it was, I was sure of it. I looked for tire tracks but it had been too dry to leave any. There was no grass in that area to tamp down. But the bushes looked like they'd been crushed down—was that from the zombie family stumbling through, or from the van?
I ran down the road, up a hill, looking for the van, peering into the woods to see if I'd just gotten the area wrong. But there was no sign of the van anywhere. I ran back the other way, craning my head, listening in the silence for the sound of the van's engine rattling. But I saw nothing anywhere. How long had I been gone? It felt in some ways like hours, but I knew it must only have been about twenty-five or thirty minutes that I'd been chased and run back. Did Ginny run into zombies, herself? Or was I in totally the wrong spot? The woods all looked the same. There weren't any real identifying factors. And I hadn't exactly been looking for landmarks when I left. I'd never thought I wouldn't be able to find my way back to the van. It has completely disappeared.
I kept going—far in one direction and then turning around and going far into the other. The light coming through the trees played tricks on me, the shadows sometimes looking like a human figure. Sometimes like a lurking zombie. But nowhere, nowhere did I see the van.
I heard gunfire not too far off and suddenly realized how exposed I was there on the road. I headed into the woods again on shaky legs. No Ginny. No van. And, while I was adding up the things I didn't have, I now had to add food and water to the list.
I did have my cell phone in my pocket. It was almost out of power. Mom and Dad hadn't let Ginny get a cell phone yet, so I couldn't try to reach her that way. But I needed so badly right then to hear a friendly voice. I kept trudging into the woods until I found an area with lots of trees and bushes to shield me. I took out my phone, pulled up my contact list, and started dialing.
The phone rang and rang. Finally, an answering machine picked up. "Hi!" said a chirpy voice. "I can't come to the phone right now, so leave a message and I'll get back to you just as soon as I can!"
When the machine beeped I said, "Nana? Nana, it's Ty. I don't know if you're okay or not. Listen, I might not have a battery on my phone for long. Mom and Dad?" I swallowed. "Nana, I'm sorry, but they're gone. Ginny and I are okay. At least, Ginny was okay, but now she's missing and I'm not in a great spot. I just wanted to let you know that she and I are going to try to reach you. So maybe look out for us? I need help. And ... I love you, Nana."
Even though I knew it wasn't a good idea, I kept calling her machine after that. Not enough to run my phone battery down much, but just to give me a boost. I couldn't feel lower than I did right then.
After I finally stopped calling Nana, I sat for a few minutes, trying to figure out what I should do. I decided I had a few priorities. I needed to find Ginny. I needed to find water...the running had made me super-thirsty. And third was that I needed to find some kind of weapon. Rocks, a big stick...something. Even if it wasn't really effective against whoever or whatever my enemy was. Until then, I was going to feel really exposed and helpless and that wasn't the way I wanted to feel.
I started walking, trying not to make much noise. I wasn't sure how the zombies found us last time, but I wondered if sounds drew them. It would make sense. They were hunting, after all.
When I stopped panicking and finally started thinking, I stopped feeling like I was going in circles. I still hadn't found Ginny or any sign at all of her, but I did see narrow trails where animals had traveled. Figuring there had to be some water nearby, I followed the trail until I found a shallow creek. I didn't have any water purification equipment and I didn't feel real good about making a fire to boil the water, either. That might attract zombies too—I didn't want to risk it. So I just knelt down by the stream and cupped my hands and drank my fill. I might pay the price later, but for right now, that water was the best stuff I'd ever put in my mouth.
I walked the whole day. To keep from being too exposed, I'd hike through the woods and then peer out onto the road at different sections and scan the area for the van. Sometimes parts of the woods all looked the same, but I tried to make sure that I was systematically covering the area. The problem was that I wasn't sure if Ginny had driven the van forward and parked, or if she'd made a turn and gone in the other direction.
I found rocks and put them in a pile in a concealed, wooded area that I thought might make a good place to bed down that night. I found a couple of heavy sticks and put them by the rocks. Simple weapons, but they made me feel better than not having anything. I even found some trash in the woods that I rinsed out in the creek and filled with water. No sign of Ginny anywhere.
When the sun started going down, my heart sank with it. Where was Ginny now? It was getting dark. Was she safe? Was she scared?
When it was totally dark, I crawled into the bushes where I'd stockpiled the homemade weapons and water and lay down. There was nothing to do but sleep. I stared at the stars through the branches, counting as many as I could see to distract myself and to try to relax enough to actually be able to sleep.
Finally, I must have fallen asleep, because the next thing I knew, I woke to the sound of twigs snapping and a panting sound. My eyes flew open to see a pair of glowing eyes.
"Race to Refuge" under pen name Liz Craig is available now on Amazon (at http://amzn.to/1SCKnHa ) , Nook, Kobo, CreateSpace, and other major retailers. I'll post a chapter each week, but if you can't wait, please visit one of the listed retailers for the completed book. Follow me on Twitter (elizabethscraig), sign up for my newsletter for a free ebook at http://eepurl.com/kCy5j , or visit my website at Elizabethspanncraig.com for more information. Hope you'll enjoy the book. Please vote on the chapter if you enjoy it.