Notes from a Necrophobe

By T.C. Armstrong

The world ends, life goes on . . . A sharp-witted novel that asks: After surviving, what do you do next?

“This is not an apocalypse, it’s an adjustment. There is still electricity. There is still the internet. There is still order. We will adapt and we will survive.” —U.S. government

After twenty years of toil, Russian researchers drilled through nearly four kilometers of ice and reached Lake Vostok, a massive body of fresh water. Unfortunately, their efforts released the microorganisms entombed inside, which nature had managed to keep sealed off from the rest of the world for twenty-five million years.

Tiny, aggressive, and lethal, the microbes emerged from the ancient lake and wormed their way into the world’s water supply. Anyone who washed their hands or took a sip of water absorbed these primal parasites and died in a fraction of a second. How do you live when the very thing you need to exist can kill you?

But death was only the beginning. The micro-killers reanimate the corpses of their victims. Their swarm intelligence enables them to observe, scheme, and cause a hell of a lot of trouble. Rot and decay forces them to hunt for a fresh host—they’re always on the lookout for the remaining survivors. Then three teenagers, one child, and one adult stumble upon a possible cure—but they have to live long enough to share their life-saving discovery with the world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Apr 21, 2015
• ISBN: 9781618685490

Book preview

KC

I can’t believe we killed Catherine.

It’s not like we were ever friends. Every neighborhood needs a crazy cat lady and she was the crazy dog lady. I’m not missing those steaming parcels of poo her terrier left on our lawn. Yet I would love to be back in a world where we could walk our dogs and gamely smile as we passed each other by.

Time had lulled me into a false sense of security. Things had been so quiet lately, we hadn’t seen the Pickup Truck for ages, and the outdoors did not smell as bad as it used to. It only took a couple of weeks to fall into some sort of rhythm: up at sunrise, exercise, salt shower, online school, TV, card games, and bed at sunset. We couldn’t risk anything seeing a light or hearing a sound once it’s dark…the Infected know that where there’s light and sound there’s life, and they’ll make a beeline for it. The thing is, we weren’t too good at schedules until we were forced into one a month ago, and the boredom of doing the same thing day in and day out eventually drove me out of the safety of our home.

I remember thinking how good it was to be out. We weren’t exactly getting a breath of fresh air, not with the stink of decay stronger outside than in, but I was willing to put up with anything to get out of the house. At least that’s what I told myself while the smell of rot grew stronger and stronger. The stench was definitely worse than the last time I had gone out. It was worse than the time we ran over a skunk, worse than my brother’s sweat socks, even worse than that Washington, DC summer sewer smell. I had hoped that our car would provide a barrier to the odor outside. Our windows were rolled up tight, and we had a virtual forest of air fresheners swinging from the rear-view mirror. Yet little stabbings of stink still managed to sneak their way inside.

I sat back, sighed, held my hankie to my face and breathed in deeply. We had drops of lavender on our tissues to try to distract us from the smell…it helped, but not much. I watched the back of my mother’s head as she drove, grateful I could avoid her stressed-out look. I concentrated on her hair as it bounced with each dip in the road. It was still in a cute short bob, but I wondered how much longer it could stay trim now that all the hairdressers were either hiding or dead. My mom’s hair is the same color as mine, auburn with strawberry blonde streaks in it, except mine’s not straight and in place like hers; mine is long and wavy and always looks like I just rolled out of bed. Into a hedge. After three days of not brushing it.

We’ve got the same pale skin too, but hers is smoothed out by makeup, and I’ll wear pancake batter before I slap that stuff on my face. We have the same green eyes and cheekbones and pointy chins. I may not care for fashion like my mom does (What’s wrong with being pretty? she asks when I put my slouchy yoga fashion on), but we do share things like hair, skin, eye color and shortness ("KC, we’re not short; we’re petite!"), and that’s about as much as we have in common. My older brother and little sister look more like my dad with their olive skin, thick brown hair, and above-average tallness.

Mom’s voice broke into my wandering urbane thoughts. Honey, are you sure about this? We don’t have to go. You can do lunch with Gemma another day. Yeah, right, like she’d forgotten that I had been begging to get out of the house the past two and a half weeks! Besides, I was starving and looking forward to eating something different to the food storage we’d been living off of. My mother was annoyingly cautious as she inched forward while looking for anything threatening. I don’t know why she bothered; we hadn’t seen a soul in weeks. I wished it were like the old days when all you had to look out for when you were driving were pets and people and other cars.

I was reminiscing about how I used to ride my bike to Gemma’s house every day when my mother commanded "KC, get your head down—now!" The fear and authority in her voice made me obey, but not before I caught a glimpse of the neighbor from the house on the corner. It was Catherine, aka the CrazyToiletBrush Lady.

CTB Lady wasn’t crazy about toilets. She was obsessed with her yappy Yorkshire terrier, and my equally yappy little sister used to say, Those Yorkshire terriers look just like toilet brushes! It was that punch line that came to mind whenever we saw her dog, so over time, Crazy Dog Lady became Crazy Toilet Brush Lady. One of CTB Lady’s less desirable habits was when she would let her dog crap on her neighbors’ lawns in full view of everyone. While the pile was still fresh, she would look at whoever was there at the time, point to the poo, and say, My dog didn’t do that.

And suddenly she was in the middle of the street. CrazyToiletBrush Lady was clearly dead, and not recently. I only got the briefest of looks, but even a quick glance revealed oozing black hollows where her eyes once were and the decomposition that had eaten holes in her cheeks. My nose confirmed the rest. I looked at my mother and wondered what she was going to do next. Would she do a quick U-turn and race home to call Homeland Security, or would she zoom around Catherine’s body and call Homeland Security from Gemma’s house?

She did neither. My mom floored it, hitting CTB Lady dead on. It was bad enough smacking into our neighbor with a teeth-rattling thump; it was even worse driving over her. My stomach flipped as I felt her bones snap under the weight of the car. It made me queasy thinking of how close we were to that eyeless corpse as we rolled over her.

My mother drove about fifteen feet, then stopped the car and watched out the back window. She was staring so intently at what was left of CTB lady that she didn’t notice when I lifted my head to watch with her. We stared at the broken body in the street, both of us as motionless as Catherine’s corpse and barely breathing. I stole a glance at my mom and wondered when we were going to move again. I looked back at the body.

Maybe it was a trick of the light, but I swear I saw CTB Lady twitch. Suddenly my body lurched forward as my mother reversed the car—right over her head.

I wasn’t hungry anymore.

RENEE

I don’t know how long Catherine has been dead or how she evaded authorities, but the sound of the car must have drawn her out into the open. I can’t believe I let KC talk me into this. I should have listened to my gut instead of my head.

Actually, it wasn’t my head that I followed. It was KC’s incessant begging and pleading. Her insistence on connecting to her best friend was enough to push us right out of the house. If I’m going to be honest, it was my mutual need to get out that made me give in.

Gemma’s family is still a bit new to the neighborhood, but that didn’t stop KC and Gemma from becoming fast friends. Yes, KC was missing her friend, and yes, I needed to talk to an adult in person for a change, but I just drove over a speed bump named Catherine, so this will have to be the last outing we make until this all blows over.

As soon as we arrive we charge up Gemma’s driveway and pull right up alongside the front door, azaleas be damned. I check to make sure the coast is clear before we open the car door and cross the two-foot distance to the front door. As I look around I remember that I once admired the garden at this house. It was once a riot of color and diversity, but there’s nothing left to look at now. A combination of neglect and an unusually cold fall has turned the flowerbeds grey and brown. The trees have reacted to the trauma of a hot summer followed by the shock of a frigid fall and have given us a stunning show of color, but we know it’s only their swan song before dying. The only real sign of life is the steady creep of weeds that slowly reclaim the land.

Gemma’s mother, Grace, is waiting at the door with the phone, her hand shaking, her eyes wide with fear. The gore and smell of rot on my car need no explanation. It was CrazyToiletBrush Lady! KC blurts out as she races upstairs to Gemma’s bedroom. I take the phone from Grace’s trembling hand to call for the Pickup Truck. I give them the details of what happened and where and silently hope they clean up CrazyToiletBrush Lady before we go. I’ll be carrying enough of that woman back home on my wheels as it is.

I hand my gift to Grace. It’s not the bottle of wine we would have given in the old life, but the most valuable thing we have now—a bottle of water. Heard from John lately? I ask. I’d rather not ask about her husband, but somehow I feel like I’m supposed to. Under the circumstances, it’s the polite thing to do. Her expression tells me she hasn’t.

I wouldn’t worry too much, I lie. There have been rolling media blackouts in the last two weeks. I’m sure he’ll get in touch with you soon. Grace and I are in the same boat with our husbands. Both of them are away; hers with the army, and mine was overseas when this whole thing started and is trapped there now. The difference between the two is that John puts his life on the line every day while he’s out fighting the Infected, whereas Grant is safe in a secure compound he helped create for his clients and their families.

I change the subject. How’s the roof garden coming along? Grace is fortunate to have a flat roof, and like many others, she has taken to growing as much food as she can on it. We only have a little balcony garden, and we are grateful to have that. It’s small, but all that matters is that no one can reach it from below.

It’s going well, but I’m still too afraid to eat anything. I can only use rainwater to water it—what if the parasites live dormant in plant cells, waiting to be ingested by a hungry victim?

I’ve had the same fears, but I’m not about to share them, so instead of saying how I really feel I point out, They proved on TV that it doesn’t. Remember when the governor ate that tomato he plucked off the vine? He took his time eating it…if there were parasites, he would have been infected within a minute.

Grace and I fall silent again. I search my mind for something to change the subject, something that won’t bring up the world as we know it, but my only thought is that someone must be cleaning Catherine off the street right now. Come to think of it, I’m tired of avoiding the present in our conversation. Instead of steering her attention elsewhere, I ask, What do you miss most from your former life?

Grace looks thoughtfully into the distance and eventually says, I miss taking Gemma to visit my parents. I’ve felt so alone since we moved away, and I’m constantly worried about them. What do you miss?

Suddenly I think of what I can say to turn this gloomy conversation around. Oh, I miss the simple things, like being able to walk naked.

Grace blinks rapidly, like she wasn’t too sure she heard me right. Sorry, what did you say?

I said I really miss being able to walk naked. I used to walk naked every day, twice a day if the weather was nice.

The look on Grace’s face shows she doesn’t know how to deal with this tidbit of information, or how to deal with me for that matter. Didn’t the neighbors mind?

It’s never seemed to bother them. They’d just smile and wave.

And you, um, you really did this every day? She’s blushing now.

Well, if it was raining pretty hard or if I was out of town I didn’t. But I really did miss it if I didn’t get a chance to walk naked. Sometimes I’d be somewhere like the grocery store and think to myself ‘I can’t wait to get home and get naked’!

Her eyebrows shoot up at this and the redness starts to spread from her cheeks to her ears. Did you only walk n-n-naked? she stammers.

Not always. Sometimes I got naked in the car.

Grace is now shifting uncomfortably in her seat. She probably regrets getting to know me. She’s fidgeting as she searches for something else to say. Finally she looks up and pointedly asks: Was Grant fine with this?

He got used to it.

So how did he feel about you walking naked?

He didn’t really care. He just wished we didn’t name the dog Naked.

KC

I thought it would be fun to see Gemma. I thought that we could recoup a bit of the old days by pretending it was just another day hanging out after school, but we’re not very good at pretending. We can’t talk about girls who annoyed us today because we haven’t seen anyone else in weeks. We can’t moan about our homework or how unfair our teachers are being because we no longer attend school. We can’t talk about going to the mall or parties. We can’t even talk about what we want to be for Halloween because there’s no way we’ll be let out for trick-or-treating. And we won’t complain about how unreasonable our moms have been lately because these days we’re just grateful to still have them.

The only thing left to talk about is the very thing we want to avoid mentioning; like talking about it could pop the precarious bubble we’ve carefully fashioned to cushion us from reality. So Mom and I stay till we’re sure that CrazyToiletBrush Lady has been scraped and bleached off the street, say our polite good-byes, and leave.

We’ve gone quiet now that we’re back on the road. What is there to say? We thought it was safe to go out and we were wrong. Now we are dealing with that putrid cadaver smell.

This is all my fault. If I hadn’t pestered Mom to let us go, we wouldn’t have had to hear/witness/smell/feel CrazyToiletBrush Lady’s second death. What was I thinking? The sound of our car was the only sound around. If there are any more Infected, like CTB Lady, they’ll head for the noise like a beacon. I shudder as I realize that Mom will now have to stay outside and hose the car down before she parks it in the garage. She’ll be vulnerable while Naked and Houston and I play lookout. On top of that I know that no matter how much soap and water she uses, she won’t be able to get rid of the odor. It’s not like she’s going to squeeze under the car and wash the leftover bits of fetid flesh off the bottom. Why didn’t I think of this before we left? Cabin fever makes me do stupid things, and nowadays stupid can get us killed.

RENEE

I settle back in my seat and relax a bit when I see that all that’s left of Catherine is a puddle of bleach. Well, that and the bits of her still stuck to the undercarriage of my car. I can’t believe I was stupid enough to venture out as if the invasion never happened. As far as I can tell, no one else is foolish enough to leave the safety of their home, especially not to pay a casual friend a visit. I did everything those government infomercials warned me not to do.

I’m still learning, I tell myself. I think back to the last time I left home. The Internet and phone lines were down so we couldn’t order more food. I was looking for an excuse to get away, and the kids wanted something more than the MREs the government sporadically drops off. I had a minivan, a misplaced sense of optimism, and a desperate need to get out of the house and do something normal for a change, so I did the most normal thing I could think of: I went shopping.

I suppose leaving the kids home alone in a post-apocalyptic world meant I finally earned that elusive Worst Mother of the Year award, but my consuming need to be free seemed to override all thoughts to the contrary. I’m a more practical than panicked type of person. I would have taken the kids with me if I thought they would have had a better chance in the car than at home, but I knew better. Before I left I drummed it into the kids’ heads how they could survive on their own. I knew they would be safe as long as they stayed behind locked doors and windows with Naked standing guard, and I felt I would be safe as long as I stayed in the car ahead of any roving packs of Infected. I wouldn’t have to worry about the Infected for long anyway because I’d be protected as soon as I passed through the fortified gates at Giant’s Grocery with their sniper-patrolled extra-thick walls.

I could actually feel myself relax on the drive over. The mind can invent some great delusions when it wants to, except my daydreams no longer consisted of trips to exotic places or swimming with sharks. My daydreams contained snippets of life before the dead walked the streets: going to the library to work on my book, meeting friends for brunch, walking the dog along the Potomac, going to parties or dinners or concerts with my husband, and lots and lots of shopping. I drove along pretending that I was on one of my fun shopping trips. I could keep up that illusion as long as I ignored the new barbed wire fences around the McMansions or the once-groomed gardens now covered in weeds, or the military fortifications that had sprung up where the cutesy boutiques and cafés once stood.

I felt a need to block out the tall sturdy gates and manned towers as I approached Giant’s Grocery, but whether I liked it or not, I still had to pass through all that security just to get to the parking lot. I could block out all of these unwelcome changes to our new life because once inside the store, things were similar to the old life. It was so much easier to pretend here, where things were pretty much the same. Well, mostly the same, apart from the extra aisles carrying nonperishable food, half the store being dedicated to bottled water, the absence of shoppers, and the guns. That’s right, my local supermarket sells weapons. That’s not normal. Even less normal was me buying one.

I headed back home feeling smug and satisfied, like I used to when all the laundry and ironing was done and the house was clean. I carried on feeling smug and satisfied as I drove well ahead of any wandering Infected that hadn’t been picked off by the gunfire. I held my breath, however, as I entered the area not covered by snipers—the Dead Zone.

This drive home felt different from the drive to the store. The sense that something dangerous was close kept my daydreams at bay and made me extra-aware of what was going on around me. Good thing too, because soon I could hear them, then I could smell them, and then I could see them emerge from the woods at the sound of my minivan chugging its way down the street. One of the asinine thoughts that cover up the rational ones popped uninvited into my head: I should have bought a quiet little Toyota Prius! If they had made their slogan Too silent to wake the dead I might have bought one before this all went down.

My stomach turned cold when I felt a hand brush against the trunk, but I was too fast for it to gain any traction. I turned around to see if it was anyone I knew. I looked back a little too long.

There were teenagers gathered like bowling pins in the street, and I struck them straight on. Most of them seemed to either fly away or slip under the wheels of the minivan. One of them went right up onto my hood, splatting pus and ooze and black blood all over the front of the car. I didn’t even think about what to do. I just reacted. First I sped up, and then I braked hard in an attempt to get rid of my horrific hood ornament. I peeled out of the zombie jamboree, my heart racing, my limbs trembling the whole drive back. I found myself fighting the rising tide of nausea at the thought of hitting a bunch of kids. I wished I had one of those airline sick bags on me because I didn’t dare risk stopping the car and opening a window to throw up. I could hardly wait to get home so I could afford to lose it.

I could see the kids’ heads appear in the top bedroom window as soon as I pulled into our driveway. They were making a broad sweep over the front lawn and street with their eyes, making sure there was nothing waiting for a chance to shamble into our garage. Their faces registered their surprise at the sploge left behind by the hood-splat corpse, but their shock was quickly replaced with the relief of me making it home. Their thumbs up told me I was clear to hit the button and pull into the garage. I carefully parked inside and exhaled in relief as the garage door closed behind me. I reached for the handle to my door, ready to fling it open and retch all over the floor.

But just as I touched the handle, I heard it: The sound of something fleshy scrapping against metal. I froze. I must have dragged one of those things home under my car! I was alone in the garage with one of the undead…but not for long.

I could feel the shaking of the walls and hear the rumbling on the stairs as the kids thundered their way down to see all the goodies I brought home. I rolled the window down two inches and screamed myself raw "Don’t open the door! Don’t open the door! Do not open that door!" I shouted my warning over and over again, hoping and praying that they heard me before it was too late.

The door opened. The door slammed shut. Muffled crying and frantic barking could be heard on the other side. Now it was just me and the ghoul. I rolled the window back up just as it finished dragging itself out from under the car. It pulled itself up by the wing mirror and pressed its squishy face against my window, probing for an open space with its swollen fingers. I dived into the back seat, tearing open bags looking for what felt like my best friend in the world right now. Once I found it, I wasted no time in loading it. I rolled the window back down an inch, shoved the barrel into the gap, turned my face away, and fired.

With trembling hands I called Homeland Security. My headless companion was ready for pickup.

HOUSTON

I’m glad KC got out. Things are so much quieter when she’s not here to fight with Jesse. I’m worried about them, but that doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate the calm. I feel weird even saying that to myself, because life in general is so much quieter than it was before. This time last year I would have been pushed out of my comfort zone into the violently overcrowded hallways of Mclean High school. Today those hallways are still crowded, but now it’s with refugees. Its halls are crammed with those who’ve lost their homes to fire, infestation, or were just too vulnerable to live in. These were the people rescued by tanks and army helicopters. I remember seeing the skies filled with them in the early days and I saw quite a few of them headed in the direction of my old high school.

KC’s a social butterfly, into her parties and her friends and misses her old life like crazy. I’m cool with our current situation. I’m also cool with being home schooled. I don’t miss the teachers whose expressions I could never read. I don’t miss trying to look people in the eye and failing again and again. I don’t miss trying to get through the day without being noticed.

I now have an excuse for not having a memorable seventeenth birthday party because nobody’s having birthday parties anymore. My birthday would have been crap even without the Invasion. A lot of my friends went with the last girl I broke up with, so I wouldn’t have been able to scratch together enough guys to hang out with at a concert or a movie and I would have had to make excuses for why my birthday was so lame. So what? Nobody’s having fun now.

My mom used to be pretty laid back before the Invasion. She said KC and I were precocious and took care of ourselves and that Jesse was her only childlike child. She just kind of left me and KC to get on with things because we did well enough in school without her help. Now that we’re homeschooled, she’s turned into a Tiger Mom. She says she wants us to be in the top of the leagues when life gets back to normal so we can get accepted into some heavily-fortified ivy-league school, but I think it has more to do with her having nothing else to do. I turn back to my computer to see if I can get something accomplished so she won’t pitch a fit when she gets back. That’s the only uncool thing about high school online; Mom can see everything, especially what I haven’t done.

When we were first attacked we stayed home like everyone else. Mom tried to shelter us against what was going on, thinking that this would blow over and our childhood would be spared. She treated the first few weeks like a snow day that soon morphed into a snow week and then a snow month. KC and Jesse wanted to go back to school and friends so badly they chose to believe Mom when she said, Just hold on—I’m sure it will be safe to go out soon. Well I know anxiety well enough to sense it in someone’s voice. And even though I can’t read an expression, I can see fear when it hides behind someone’s eyes. In my mom’s eyes that fear is omnipresent.

So after about a month of us sheltering at home, the government decided that it may never be safe for anyone to venture out again and turned the whole country on to online learning. It left the field wide open for cheating, but it was better than nothing. And it wasn’t just school that went completely online. You could get what you wanted on the Internet before the war, but soon it became the only way to get anything. Malls and supermarkets basically turned into Amazon-style warehouses, transferring their storefront bling into multi-media advertising and armored delivery vehicles. So shopping carries on despite a few casualties. In my ex-girlfriend’s opinion, the biggest casualty is fashion. She goes on and on about it in her Facebook posts and on her blog. Why not just let yourself go? Who cares what you are wearing when nobody’s around to see you? Who’s going to know that you’ve been in the same sweatpants for a week if you don’t leave your home in the first place? Reading this makes me feel like I’ve dodged a bullet. It makes me glad we broke up.

Mom’s not worried about fashion; she’s worried that everyone’s going to get out of shape. All outdoor activities are suspended, health clubs are also filled with refugees, and nobody can tell how fat you are getting when you’re behind closed doors. It’s a toxic combination for the nation’s health. We have TV, we have our food delivered and we’re depressed. The government requires each channel to have a daily fitness hour, but I doubt anyone but my mom is following it.

Mom’s taking longer than I thought she would. Has she decided to stay and chat with Gemma’s mom? I pick a few tunes on the guitar to get my mind off of them being gone, but it doesn’t help. Going back to my assignments doesn’t help either, so I do what I do when I can’t concentrate on school: I turn to Facebook. I don’t mind socializing as long as it’s online. I used to use apps like Snapchat or Tumblr or Instagram or sometimes even Formspring. The government does what it can to keep the Internet going, but for some reason the only social apps that work these days are Facebook and Twitter, and I almost never go on Twitter.

Even though Facebook still works, it’s nothing like it was before everything went to hell. Dad used to lecture that things like Facebook and Instagram and Twitter were places where people stopped living life trying to prove to others they’re doing so. Or he’d say, Social media is where people go to be socially competitive. Not anymore. These days Facebook is a place you go to find the living among the dead.

I go through the same ritual I go through every day: I trawl through the friends whose pages have no activity. I try to ignore what it means when a friend’s account has been inactive, and I keep poking them like you’d poke a dead bird on the sidewalk with a stick. Nope, still nothing new on Anne or Braden or John or Erika or Mary’s sites. The past few weeks have been worrying because more and more of my friends’ accounts have been winking out. All I can do is hope they are in a refugee center and not dead. It’s a feeble thought, because a lot of my friends are scattered between different refugee centers, and they have Internet time slots allotted so they can keep in touch with friends and family. Yesterday I even got a warning from Ben; he’s in the Mclean Staybridge Suits Refugee Center, and he said I should stuff some valuables like candy and Nintendo DSi games in my split kit (as in Take your kit and split! which sounds much better than the CDC’s seventy-two-hour kit or bug-out bags) to trade for other contraband in case I ever end up in a refugee center. I wasn’t even aware people had Nintendo DSs anymore.

Unfortunately, Ben has real school; there are too many people and too few computers in a refugee center to make online school possible. The teachers are barely qualified, but you work with what you’ve got because the government has had little luck hiring anyone willing to live in a place where you can’t get away from your students.

I find my thoughts drifting back to Mclean High School. For some reason I start wondering what’s happened to the Rock. Nobody knows where the Rock came from, everyone assumes it’s always been there and they just decided to build the school around it. It’s a local landmark and sits on the grass island that forms a circle in front of the Kiss-‘N-Ride entrance of the school. The cool thing about the rock, other than the fact that it’s as big as a shed, is that it gets painted every week. I used to think it was the seniors that did it, but my friends told me that you had to earn the right to paint it, so different clubs and groups decorated it. For example, when the tennis team won a tournament they painted it luminous yellow—the same color of their tennis balls. When the soccer team won a hard match against our main rival, Langley, they covered it in black-and-white hexagons to make it look like a soccer ball, tho’ all they did was make it look deflated and misshapen. When the cheerleaders scored a trophy they painted it white and covered it in their names, scrawling them with big bubble letters in a bid to outdo each other and claim all the attention. When no one won anything, they let the glee club paint it. They always made it look like a rainbow had thrown up all over it.

So who’s painting it now? I heard that the grounds have been cleared all around the school and that huge guarded barricades now surround it, which means as long as it’s not raining, people can still go out and paint it. But do the refugees know the rules of the Rock? Do they realize they have to earn the right to paint it, or do the guards just let anybody scribble graffiti on it? And what would one do these days to earn the right to paint the Rock? Does the honor go to the one who saved the most people? To the one who has the best-packed split kit? The best escape story? The Zombie-Kill-Of-The-Week? Or do they let the person with the biggest loss paint out their sorrows like some creepy consolation prize? Sorry about your family…but here you go, you’ve earned the right to paint the Rock.

My phone buzzes. The hourly We’re okay, text my mother sends whenever she has to go out has come through. I let out the breath I didn’t realize I’d been holding, but catch it again when I hear the Bring-Out-Your-Dead Pickup Truck whoosh its way up our street. Who is it for this time? It hasn’t been to our neighborhood in weeks.

It’s going in the direction my mother just went.

JESSE

I hear the Pickup Truck, going up our street. I’m not supposed to look out the windows, but I’ve been so booooored for so long…hours and hours and days and weeks. It’s cool to see anything new, even if it is just a government cleanup crew.

They think I’m too dumb to know what’s going on just ‘cause I’m nine. They don’t know that I can sneak so so so quietly downstairs and not make any floorboards creak, not even once, and breathe real quiet and watch TV with them from the stairs. I used to do this to watch their movies they said were too grownup for me. I mean, so what? Whatever. They almost always turned out to be either too boring or…okay, never