I Am Forgotten

By J.A. St. Thomas

A violent pandemic divides what remains of the world into victims, villains and heroes. Sixteen-year-old Jackson Riley is about to find out that sometimes, under the worst of circumstances, a person can be all three.

Quiet and shy, Jackson has few enemies but even fewer friends. Family means everything to him, but when faced with death at the hands of his virus-crazed parents, he is forced to make an unspeakable choice.

In the aftermath, he struggles to crawl out from beneath the crushing weight of guilt and responsibility in a world devastated by a pathogen designed to kill every adult.

Alone but for his younger sister, he is easy prey for an enigmatic cult of superhuman beings hell-bent on exploiting him for their own nefarious intentions. Betrayed and teetering on the brink of defeat, he jumps at a chance to rewrite history and save the world, despite the consequences.

• Language: English
• Publisher: J.A. St. Thomas
• Release date: Sep 30, 2014
• ISBN: 9781310484643

J.A. St. Thomas

J.A. St. Thomas has been writing most of her life. Growing up the only child of late in life parents, her imagination received a healthy workout.After moving to New York, she spent a short time working in film before meeting her husband. Then kids happened and writing quickly found its way to the to-do-list, remaining there far too long.A handful of her short stories have won competitions and been published in small presses. However, writing novel length fiction is her true passion.When she’s not writing, she enjoys spending time with her family, reading, music and anything related to horror, especially zombies.

Book preview

I am Forgotten

A novel by J.A. St. Thomas

Copyright © 2012 J.A. St. Thomas

All Rights Reserved.

This book is dedicated, in loving memory, to my parents

Rolland J. & Betty L. St. Thomas

I am the world’s forgotten boy, the one who searches and destroys.

~Search and Destroy~

Iggy and The Stooges

Table of Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Acknowledgements

Chapter One

And we can’t live if we’re too afraid to die.

* * *

On the last morning before the world comes undone, I don’t tell anyone I love them. I’m not any kinder or more helpful. I don’t take out the trash or hug my sister. Nope, not me. I sit in my room and play something on my laptop. I’d like to say it’s chess or some other game that enhances brain power, but I’d be lying. I think I hear my brain cells screaming for sustenance as I navigate a landscape filled with zombies, half-naked girls, and so much profanity Mom would pop an aneurism, and I’ve already logged more hours than I bother to count too many hours but what do I care at seven in the morning on a school day? I don’t have a first-period class, and Claire doesn’t need to leave until eight. On the morning before the world comes undone, I play video games and eat a Pop-Tart.

 I barely even notice when Mom opens the door to remind me that because she’ll be tied up in a committee meeting, I’ll have to walk Claire to her piano lesson after school. Mom’s joined so much useless crap since she got laid off, I can hardly keep track anymore.

Jackson! she snaps, and I turn to scowl at her.

Before she can bark at me again, she sneezes, and for the first time, I notice the slightly bruised puffiness beneath her eyes and the angry redness chafing the edges of her nose.

***

The rifle jumps and jitters in my hands, and no matter how much I will them to be still, they’re not. Mom, or the thing that was my Mother, throws herself against the pocket doors in the family room over and over, grunting each time she makes contact. She’s too close. So fucking close I feel the vibrating strain of the wood deep inside my bones.

Dad coughs.

I swing the barrel around until it’s level with his head. The tremors are bad. His body convulses beneath the blanket draped over his shoulders. I’m fine, he says, and waves me off, wiping at the never-ending flow of snot cascading from his nose. Take your sister and go! he hisses.

Too late, I snap, spraying spit everywhere. He’s dying, and I feel nothing and there isn’t a damn thing I can do for him anyway. I wish I gave a shit, but I’m all tapped out. Too much happening too fast. I’m running on empty.

Sweat pours down my neck. I swing the barrel back to the pocket doors. She throws herself against them, and they bow out toward me, little splinters of wood flying in every direction. One nicks my cheek, and hot blood runs from the wound, leaving a trail of warmth in its wake. Why couldn’t she just stay dead?

Jack! Claire screams. I barely hear her over the sound of Mom trying to escape her makeshift morgue.

What? I shout. My heart races.

Daddy. Jack. Daddy, Claire chants between sobs.

I turn, terrified of what I’ll see. Claire is in the closet that passes for a pantry. Her tiny feet push uselessly at the floor as she tries to disappear into the wall behind her.

An earsplitting crack rips through the room. I whip my head around so fast that sharp pain shoots through my neck. My hands are wet. The rifle slips. I almost drop it. The door frame is pulling away from the wall, nails shriek their way out of sheetrock and lumber.

She is coming.

Dad’s voice rings in my ears, not the tortured, incoherent gurgle from the kitchen floor behind me, but his frightened yet determined words from the previous night.

If we turn, shoot us!

I readjust the rifle against my shoulder. Claire whimpers from the cupboard behind me.

Another thunderous crack, and the frame breaks away completely, crashing into the opposite wall.

Behind me I hear the ugly splat of vomit hitting tile. I risk a glance.

Dad is doubled over, a puddle of black bile at his feet.

Close the door, Claire! I shout.

There’s no time to make sure she listens. The pocket doors give one last screech of protest and come bursting off their track.

Everything slows down. Mom claws her way past the rubble of the doors in slow motion. Blood oozes from wounds, soaking her clothes and smearing her face. Her body is covered in ragged bites. Some are only bruised half-moons, but others have chunks of flesh torn out.

My stomach flips precariously. She’s been eating herself.

 I aim for her forehead.

 Time speeds up. She rushes toward me. My finger jumps against the trigger. The shot pulls wide, and the bullet tears through her shoulder. I stumble back a step. Damn! That was powerful. She slams into the far wall of the kitchen and crumples to the floor most of her left shoulder gone.

Shit!

Everything is quiet.

A sickening suck-suck noise drowns out Claire’s whimpers. I turn, barrel raised and ready. Dad sits splay-legged in front of the stove. His face is half hidden behind the forearm he intently gnaws on. Blood runs down his chin, splashing the white tile between his legs. When did that happen?

Damn it! I scream. This isn’t fair. Un-fucking-fair!

Dad growls threateningly, gnashes his teeth and rips a fist-sized chunk from his arm.

How long until he stops eating that and starts trying to eat us? What the hell is happening? I line up the shot and pull the trigger. Dad falls back, what’s left of his head hitting the stove. My stomach lurches and twists.

There’s a beat of silence. Claire has stopped screaming, Dad is dead, and I can barely breathe, but it all explodes in a heartbeat as the monster shakes off what should be a mortal wound. She moves fast. I’m barely able to get a round off. It hits her in the center of her forehead, and she staggers, just missing the splintered door frame. I yank the trigger back again, not caring where the bullet hits her. Mom falls backward into the family room.

Come on, Claire, I urge her. I try not to slither into the inky-black depths of despair, but I’m coming apart. Move now!

***

Jack? Her voice pulls me from a dream in which I fail to kill the things that were once our parents a dream that ends with them playing tug-of-war with Claire’s lifeless body while I stand by paralyzed with fear and useless. They rip flesh and growl, and I am evil because all I can think is, please don’t look at me. My eyes snap open, and I bite my lip to keep from screaming. What? I manage.

You were dreaming, she says, snuggling up against me. It feels weird when she does this, as if everything is normal. Will they wake up again? She has asked me this more times than I can count since Mom and Dad died. She’s barely eight, and I worry for her. Who the fuck am I kidding? I’m worried for both of us.

I don’t think so.

Her eyes are wet and wide. Can we ever leave here? I’m scared.

I’m scared too, but I won’t tell her. She needs me to be strong, and I need me to be sane. There are others still out there, Claire. It’s too dangerous. She must hear them outside. I know I do, though I wish I didn’t.

Can they get in? Another of her favorite questions. Some days I wish my ears would fall off.

No. I don’t think so. Remember Dad and I boarded up the windows before he got sick? I squeeze her shoulders and let her stay close. We are safer here, I say, but what I’m really thinking is that I’m not counting on it staying that way.

She yawns. Okay.

Go back to sleep. I’ll fix something to eat a little later. I close my eyes. It’s dark on both sides of my eyelids. All we do is sleep. I wish I could turn on a light or something, but I’m afraid it will attract them. Maybe later I will get Dad’s little camping lantern. I think it’s in here somewhere.

For now I let the numbness of sleep take me.

***

They scratch at the boards that cover the windows, constant and unrelenting. I hear them, always, pulling away the only remaining barrier that separates us. Even up here, in the office, hidden in a windowless room we are not safe.

I wait for someone, anyone, to save us.

***

Jack? Claire wakes me yet again.

I sit up, pushing her away gently. She’s too warm. She makes me lethargic. We are stagnating. Yeah? I stretch, and my muscles and tendons creak and groan like ancient floorboards.

Do you think Mommy and Daddy went to heaven?

I nod, though I’m fairly certain she is as blind as I am in the empty blackness and that everything I do goes unwitnessed. I don’t want to tell her I no longer believe in heaven or God or anything. How could any creator destroy with such absolute and unyielding viciousness? I crawl across the floor in the dark, feeling my way over the carpet, feeling my way over the ghost of my father’s footprints, until I run into his desk. The lantern sits in the empty space his office chair once occupied the kind of chair with wheels. After Mom stopped walking, Dad rigged it up to move her around the house. She barely lived long enough to use it.

But people who do bad things don’t go to heaven, right?

The ON switch makes a tiny click.

Claire jumps a little at the flickery blue light that dances inside the lantern’s dome. I squint away the stinging pain the sudden illumination brings with it, fighting back the tears that attempt to follow. I’m so tired of keeping my shit together.

Mom and Dad didn’t know what they were doing, I say, carrying the lantern back to where she sits. The thing that made them sick, that was the bad thing, not Mom and Dad.

She is silent for a moment. But why did Mommy get up again? Was she just sleeping?

I know she knows Mom wasn’t sleeping. She knows she was dead, or at least she knows we all assumed she was dead. It’s so hard for her, but I play along and talk in circles. No. She was dead. Then she wasn’t. But she is now. I sigh. It all makes about as much sense as a lecture from my weed-smoking American History teacher. Cookies! Civil War! Oh look, a bumblebee pooping rainbows.

Yeah. I guess so, she says. But what about Daddy? Why did you shoot Daddy?

This one is harder. Dad was sick. Very sick. He had the same thing as Mom. My stomach does a flip, twisting in the iron grip of my remorse. I had to do it. I promised Dad. I’m sorry.

She pats my arm to comfort me, but her eyes say she isn’t convinced and I should expect another round of interrogation soon she’s nothing if not thorough. She gets up and rifles through a bag of clothing Dad stashed here before he got sick, before anyone got sick. I’m not really sure what he thought would happen back then when no one was sick and the biggest threat was human stupidity. But something drove him to stash food and supplies up here, and I’m grateful for it. Some things in the bag of clothes fit, and some things don’t. She’s running out of options. Unfortunately, there’s even less for me. Fire flashes through my chest at the thought of Dad carefully choosing things he thought Claire might like. He always thought of us first. Guilt threatens to suffocate me, so I get up and arrange the granola bars on the desk.

Inside a small, doorless bathroom in Dad’s office, Claire changes. Do you think there are other people like us out there? she asks.

How do I answer? I want to believe others have survived, but I’m not so sure. What if we are the last two people left alive in the city? In the state? In the country? Or, God help us, the world? I hope so, I finally manage, choking on the words.

After she changes, she sits on the cot, reading one of the books Dad tucked away here. I’m happy she is distracted. She holds the page close to her face and squints in the weak light. I find myself organizing our food again. It’s getting low, and that worries me. There are only a few canned goods left, and the packaged stuff is almost gone. I’m starting to think we will need to leave our safe place.

Later, after she’s put her book away, I bring it up. I’m not sure how much longer we can stay here.

Without looking up, she replies. We’re running out of things to eat?

Yes. What’s the point of lying about this?

Her tiny shoulders droop a little. I’m scared.

No point in lying about this either. Me too.

***

Something jolts me awake, not Claire this time but something else. Without turning on the lantern, I scoot my butt across the floor until I run into the wall. Pressing my ear against the plaster and sheetrock, I listen, straining for a clue about what yanked me from sleep. The wall is cool against the skin of my cheek, and I want so much to melt away into it. Or find a way through it, out into the world, away from the undead with their empty eyes and eager teeth.

Thump! I hear the thing that woke me. Footsteps, hard and heavy but not uneven like the undead.

People!

A million possibilities run through my head the National Guard, the military, neighbors, cops…adrenaline and excitement torture my already raw nerves.

Hello? I choke out, though it sounds like little more than a croak. I clear my throat and try again. We’re upstairs! Upstairs! My voice cracks, turning the last syllable into a shriek.

Nothing. The only answer is the same hard sound of boots on wood. I feel the desperation growing inside me, and I know that soon it will blossom into an unbridled panic. I crawl across the office floor, meaning to throw open the door I need to let them know we are here!

 And then I hear something else, not the sound of the sure and solid footsteps of the living but the low, violent hiss of the dead.

I open my eyes to the dark, swathed in silence, a scream on my lips.

***

We only make it through another four cycles of the clock before I mention leaving again. Claire, we have to go look for food.

Mommy and Daddy are still out there. Her voice scares me. It sounds broken.

I have to get her out of here. Yes, but they are dead. Let’s just go downstairs to the hall and peek out the window. If we see anything out there, any of them, we’ll come right back. Promise.

We need food, though.

I can get some from the pantry. That way we won’t have to go outside. I’m pretty sure she isn’t buying anything I’m saying. Hell, I’m not even buying what I’m saying.

If I don’t want to go, will you be mad?

No. We still have a little food left. We have to leave, but I don’t want to force her. Not yet.

I don’t want to go, Jack. I’m scared.

I nod. I know.

Sometime, during the middle of the night, the electricity finally gives out. The red glow of Dad’s digital clock is gone, and the darkness is complete. Reaching out blindly, I wave one hand in the air and run the other across the floor, searching for the battery-operated lantern. The rough pile of the carpet scratches my palm. I’m positive I will knock something over. Then I find it. I flip the switch, and the artificial blue flame flickers against the oppressive black of the room.

Claire still sleeps thankfully. The room is even more terrifying than it was before the power failed. Closed in, claustrophobic. Now is the time to move on. We will lose our minds if we stay here much longer, or at least I will. I know it. I’m busy formulating a plan to get her to follow me, when the absence of noise any noise makes the hair on my arms stand stiff. The low, insistent hum of power is missing. In its place is nothing. No screams, no moans, no sounds of infected people. Nothing other than my heart throwing itself against my ribs and Claire’s soft, shallow breathing.

For a sliver of a moment, I have hope.

Claire. She rolls away when I try to shake her awake. Claire!

She stirs, What?

It’s time to leave. The power is out.

Oh.

She sits up slowly, fear in her eyes.

It’ll be okay. We’ll just do what I said, go downstairs and check things out. I say it out loud and reach out to reassure her. And myself.

It’s too much for her, and for a moment, her questionable grip on sanity begins to slip.

What about washing clothes? Or Christmas? Big, fat tears roll down her cheeks as she stares at me, not comprehending. How can we have Christmas without power? Jack?

I say the only thing that comes to mind. We’ll find a way. I promise. I’m full of promises I have no idea how to keep.

The food and water are running low, and without electricty we can’t even replenish the water in the bathroom. Up until now, something in the back of my mind had kept the panic switch turned off, but losing power flipped it. I need to get out. More than anything in the world, more than our safety, more than finding others like us more than any of that I need to get out.

Claire shoves clothing into an old tote bag, blindly packing whatever is close at hand. She cries the entire time. I’m starting to think I should just go alone, grab some supplies, come back, wait for a while, and let her adjust to the idea of moving at her own pace. Before I can tell her this, she is standing in front of me with a backpack slung over one shoulder. Her eyes are red and puffy, but the tears have stopped.

I’m ready. She turns and walks to the door.

I don’t argue with her. What’s the point? She’s giving me what I want she’s leaving the room.

Wait. Let me get something, I say, my nerves raw and jittery.

She looks at me with frightening calm and waits.

In a file cabinet tucked into a far corner of Dad’s office, in the bottom drawer under some papers, is a handgun. He showed it to me once, even let me hold it. I stuff a box of ammunition and the gun into the pocket of my hoodie. I still have the rifle slung over my shoulder. No idea what’s waiting for us, but I’m not taking any chances.

The air in Dad’s office is stale and smells of fear. When I open the door, the air on the other side is cool and foul. I try to remember exactly where Mom and Dad are. She crashed through the pocket doors and rushed