CHAPTER ONE
I could deal with the Husk People. They were pretty easy by this point. Usually, anyway, as long as they weren't in a group of more than two or three. I'd just take out my trusty screwdriver, lunge, stab through the heart or through an eye, and move on to the next. Repeat. Repeat, repeat, repeat.
Often, I didn't even bother to attack and kill them. Not unless I'd already set up camp for the night, or one of them was directly in my path, or one of them had somehow backed me into a corner. Otherwise, I just out-walked them, or jogged around them, or hid from them. They weren't very fast. So, because of this, and because I was now a seasoned pro at killing them, they usually didn't cause me much trouble.
It was the roving groups of men who did. Currently, one group of four burly, raggedy-looking men was chasing me across a vast open land filled with high Kentucky bluegrass, which was slowing me down a bit. My enormous duffel bag filled with supplies was also slowing me down, more than a bit. If I'd had to guess, I would have said it probably weighed close to forty pounds, and was feeling heavier with each step I took. Not to mention that I was also wearing a backpack that probably weighed eight or ten pounds. I may as well have been running across the meadow with a child over one arm and a baby on my back.
It was my own stupid fault. Realizing earlier in the day that I'd gotten a bit off track from my course south, I'd decided to redirect myself by cutting across the grasslands. Normally, I avoided traveling without cover of trees, or at least without cover of trees very close by, which wasn't very hard to do, considering that the back roads I'd taken for most of my journey were flanked by thick forestland.
But on this particular day, with the sun just beginning to sink low, I'd just wanted to get myself back on course quickly, then walk a few additional miles before setting up camp at nightfall. Now it seemed I was going to pay for my desire for haste, but I wasn't going to let that happen without trying like hell to save myself first.
I was a fast runner, normally maybe even incredibly fast. Though saddled with my bags at present, I was maybe just fast. Still, I knew I had a good shot of outrunning the men behind me, who I'd happened to spot when I'd paused for a sip of water. The one-second glance I'd taken before sprinting off had told me that they were all big men, potbellied, and maybe not very used to running.
If I could just beat them to the tree line, I might have a real shot at losing them. I was good at zipping through the woods, good at stealthily picking my way across rugged terrain where there wasn't even the hint of a trail. Something told me that the men behind me would be more likely to crash through the forest like a herd of wild elephants, their noise alerting me to their location.
Currently, their location was maybe sixty or seventy feet behind me, close enough that I could hear when one of them shouted, voice low and menacing.
"Stop, you bitch! We'll shoot you dead if you don't!"
I was going to call their bluff on this. During my recent travels, I'd learned that most people had long since run out of ammunition. And even if the men behind me did still have some, I was just betting they wouldn't use it to kill me. Try to scare me or wound me to stop me, maybe. Possibly. Though I knew they'd avoid even that at all costs, since sudden noise, especially gunfire, drew the Huskers in droves, and nobody wanted that. But even if the men were reckless and didn't care about that, they wouldn't kill me.
I was pretty confident about that. Women had become far, far too rare and valuable a commodity to just summarily execute for running.
It had all started about two years earlier. One day, the world was normal. The next, it wasn't. It was as if some otherworldly portal had opened, releasing hell. Some strange, deadly virus had spread, killing millions and millions of people literally within forty-eight hours. The hospitals had overflowed. The morgues had overflowed. The streets had overflowed with piles of bodies ten feet high.
In the midst of it all, there were some people who hadn't gotten the virus, some of them terrified, some of them grief-stricken, and some of them both, that had ended their lives right out in the open. From my third-floor apartment balcony, I'd witnessed one woman helpfully place herself atop a high pile of bodies, ranting about God and the "end of days," before putting a gun to her temple and blowing her brains out, joining the other corpses in repose. Sickened, horrified, and saddened in some excruciatingly profound way, I hadn't been able to stop vomiting for an hour.
Later that day, I'd gotten word that my two figure skating coaches, Sandor and Marta, who'd coached me from my preteen years all the way up to an Olympic bronze medal and present day, had both succumbed to the virus. They'd been like parents to me. I'd even lived with them for the remainder of my teen years after my biological parents had been killed in a car accident when I was sixteen.
The virus killed young and old, men and women, but it hit women the hardest, by far. As to exactly how many women died, I really had no idea, but some fellow travelers I'd come across in my journey south estimated that when it came to the decimated population, men now outnumbered women ten-to-one. Some put that figure even higher, even a lot higher, guessing that men now outnumbered women fifty-to-one. Others said that it just depended on where in the country you were.
All that was clear was that women were now exceedingly rare, and women of childbearing age rarer still. This made all women, regardless of age, size, and level of attractiveness, extremely valuable and sought-after as intimate partners and permanent life companions. Women of childbearing age were even more valuable and sought-after. We were wanted not only to be intimate partners and wives, but also because it would be up to us to repopulate the world, as well.
At present, becoming an intimate partner wasn't even remotely on my radar, nor was repopulating the world. I was on a mission. One day at a time and one step at a time, I was heading south, to Nashville. I was going to find my sisters, Jessica and Ebony. They weren't my biological sisters, but they may as well have been.
All of us only children, the three of us had grown up together, skating at the same rink in suburban Detroit since kindergarten. We'd gone on to compete for nationals together and train for the Olympics together. Jess and Eb had become my heart sisters and the best friends I'd ever had. And I was going to find them. Though first, I had to outrun the group of men behind me. When I heard the same man shouting again, he sounded a little closer.
"I'm warning you, bitch! Stop or we'll shoot you dead!"
I doubted it. Though if he and his friends caught up to me, I was certain that rape and other horrific abuse was in my future.
"We'll shift on your ass, too! We're bears! We'll claw your guts out even after we shoot ya!"
That I seriously doubted. Not that bear shifters were not a real thing, but that the men behind me were actually bear shifters. If they were, it seemed like they would have shifted right away to chase me instead of running behind on foot.
Animal shifters had happened, if happened was even the right word, shortly after the virus had hit. The Husk People, who were also referred to as Huskies, Huskers, Bloodsuckers, The Undead, and Zombies, had also happened shortly after the virus had hit.
During the outbreak, televisions and radios had blared with one message in a computerized, monotone, recorded male voice. Level twelve. Repeat. Level twelve. Midnight. Repeat. Midnight. All level twelve government employees, please report. All military personnel, please report to your posts. This message had played on a loop, over and over without ceasing, on every single television channel and radio station for days before suddenly stopping.
No one knew what the hell "level twelve" was, or what "midnight" meant. Some people thought it meant that some kind of germ warfare had started the virus. Some people thought that the military would soon come rolling in to clear away the quickly-piling bodies and prevent further spread of the virus somehow, but they never did. And on the fifth day after the outbreak, when the stench coming from the streets was becoming nearly unbearable, the bodies started clearing away themselves.
Locked in my apartment, where I'd been since the second day of the virus, I'd been looking out the French doors of my balcony late at night, sobbing, trying to get phone calls to Jess and Eb to go through when I'd seen it. It being the corpses in the street rising, staggering off with halting, jerky steps, hissing and moaning, their rotting bodies glinting silver in the moonlight.
I'd watched for a minute or two, now completely silent, before backing away from the glass doors and into my living room, dropping my phone and collapsing to my rear. Probably the perfect picture of terror, I just sat hugging my knees to my chest, rocking slightly and praying, for at least an hour. Even then, I was only spurred into getting up by the sound of one of my neighbors pounding on my apartment door, begging for help, saying that her little girl had a high fever, which was the first sign of the virus.
Together, we bathed the two-year-old girl in cool water, fed her crushed acetaminophen tablets in applesauce, and held washcloths dampened with witch hazel and cooling peppermint extract to her forehead. But by dawn, it became clear that our efforts were in vain. Screaming that she hurt, the burning-hot toddler began to seize, and she soon fell silent, not breathing. Wailing, her now-feverish mother snatched up the little girl and made a beeline for my balcony before I could even take two steps.
She'd somehow managed to hoist herself up to sit on the railing before I could even get close, despite the fact that she had her limp little girl in one arm, and when she jumped, my grasping hands met nothing but air. The yelled word no got stuck in my throat as I looked over the railing and saw both mom and toddler hit the sidewalk a second later.
Neither of them moved after impact. Several hours later, I watched while they both rose to their feet almost simultaneously and slowly staggered down the street in different directions, joining hundreds of other corpses rising from the body piles.
I spent the rest of the day crying, rocking, sleeping fitfully, and once again trying to get calls through to Jess and Eb. However, every time I placed a call, a message saying all circuits busy popped up on my phone. All text messages were returned as failed to send. The internet was down as well, not allowing me to connect from phone or laptop.
Early that evening, sounds that sounded something like roaring made me tiptoe over to the French doors of the balcony, shaking like a leaf, terrified that it was all the dead people, or undead people, or whatever they were, making the ferocious noises.
However, to my surprise, most of the remaining undead people were clearing the street, being chased away by lions, bears, and tigers. Blinking, I pressed my forehead to the glass, wondering if I was finally coming down with the fever myself and was now hallucinating. I didn't feel at all warm, though. In fact, I'd felt chilled to the bone all day, despite the fact that it was nearly June and muggy.
My air conditioning had suddenly shut off along with the power earlier that day. From what it looked like, no one in the neighborhood had power anymore, with all apartment buildings and businesses completely dark in the dimness of early evening.
There was just enough light left in the day, though, that I could see that my eyes weren't deceiving me. The street beneath my apartment was filled with bears, lions, and tigers. Actual wild animals. In Detroit.
Opening the French doors and stepping out onto the balcony so I could see better, the only thing I could think of was that they must have all escaped from the zoo. Maybe the power outage was citywide, and maybe cage locks at the zoo operated on a power source. And maybe a generator hadn't kicked on or something.
However, an absolutely bizarre, astonishing sight soon told me that this idea was nowhere near the mark. The wild animals in the street weren't from the zoo. Seeming to suddenly catch sight of me on my balcony, a large black bear just transformed, which was the only way I could think of it, into the form of a man within the blink of an eye. The man was even fully dressed, wearing jeans and a t-shirt, as if his clothes had somehow transformed right along with him. While I stood with my mouth hanging open, the tall, red-haired man then shouted up to me.
"Stay indoors! The sick people aren't alive anymore! They're just shells...just husks of people! They want blood, and anyone they drink from gets the fever and becomes a husk as well! If you see any in your building and you can't escape them, try to kill them!"
As the wild animals chased more undead people down the street, I just stared down at the man for a long moment before shouting myself. "But...how? How do I kill them?"
"They go down and stay down if you get them through the eye or heart with something sharp! But stabbing anywhere else, including their heads, doesn't work! You can also take their heads right off, if need be...that's how I and my fellow shifters are doing it!"
As if to prove this point, a tiger some distance behind the man pounced on an undead person, severing its head with a snap of his mighty jaws.
Feeling as if I were in some sort of waking nightmare far beyond my wildest imagination, I just stared down at the man before speaking again. "What are 'shifters'? How are all these animals...how did you...what's happened?"
As the noise of fighting behind him grew louder, the man cupped his hands around his mouth to shout up to me. "I don't have much time to explain, but whatever the virus is, it turned some of us men into part-animals after the fever instead of killing us! No one knows a lot right now. We're just trying to keep everyone safe and clear all the Husk People from the city.
“Some of us are getting bitten and turning into Husks ourselves, so I need to go help. Those of us who survive the city-clearing will be back for you survivors. Just stay put! Don't leave your building! Don't leave your own apartment, even, unless you need emergency food or medicine! We'll be back!"
With that, the man turned, shifted back into the form of a bear, and headed up the street, where a lion was being swarmed by a group – at least a dozen – moaning Husk People. I never saw the red-haired man again, or any of his fellow animal shifters, either, at least not in Detroit. After a few days, I assumed that they'd all been turned to Husk People themselves during the fighting, or had been run out of the city.
That had all been nearly two years earlier, and I'd survived by my own wits and strength since then. I wasn't about to let a group of men with rape surely on their minds take me down now. They were gaining on me, though, and their apparent leader was shouting again.
"We're gonna get you, bitch, and now we're gonna make it harder on ya!"
His voice told me that he, and maybe the entire group of four, was only twenty or thirty feet behind me now. I knew I had to ditch my heavy duffel bag, even though it contained nearly my entire precious food supply, and also weapons and first-aid supplies that I needed to survive.
I could re-gather those things, however, if I could survive long enough to do so. On the other hand, if captured, I knew I probably wouldn't be able to escape. Ultimately, the decision was easy.
Still running, I just let my duffel bag fall from my shoulder, and soon I was speeding across the fields, feet absolutely flying through the tall bluegrass. I could have laughed for joy. I could have let loose with peals of laughter. I was going to outrun the four dirty bastards behind me, and easily, too. Once I got into the forest, they'd never catch my dust.
My internal celebration suddenly came to a grinding, screeching halt, however. Not sixty or seventy feet ahead of me, a large group of at least eight or nine men stood on the crest of a gently sloping hill not far from the treeline. Having just been clearing a gently-sloping hill near the edge of the grassland myself, I'd gasped when they'd come into view, and now I couldn't breathe,
couldn't draw even a single breath even though my lungs were burning from exertion. The fact that I'd immediately slowed, losing ground, allowed me to hear the voice of the leader of the smaller group still behind me in the distance.
"Just stop now, honey! Our friends got ya blocked! Might as well save your energy for what's about to happen!"
I would just dart around. I would just dart right around the larger group of men and head right into the forest where I could lose them. But now I saw two additional men jogging in from the east. To the west, two more were sprinting at me.
It was over. I knew it. At the very least, I was going to be taken captive and surely gang-raped. At the very worst, I knew I might lose my life in an attack by sixteen or seventeen men. I would never see Jessica and Ebony again. My journey of nearly two years would be for nothing.
I wasn't about to just lie down and accept this, though. After coming to a dead stop, I frantically shrugged off my backpack and pulled my well-used Phillips head screwdriver from my jeans pocket.
Brandishing it at the men racing toward me from all directions, I shouted at the top of my lungs. "Come on, then! Meet Phillip. He's going to kill at least one of you before you can do what you want." Breath coming in ragged gasps, I tightened my grip on Phillip's handle. "Come find out which one of you it's going to be!"
*
I owed it to Jessica and Ebony to not give up until the last. I knew they'd want me to fight just as hard as I'd fought to try to get to them.
Several hours after the red-haired bear-shifter man had shouted up to me on my balcony, I'd finally been able to get through to Jess. After I'd stifled a near-scream of joy at hearing her voice, the conversation had been a very brief one before the line went dead. However, by that point, I'd heard all I needed to know.
She and Ebony were okay. Neither of them had gotten the virus. They were in the same situation I was in, holed-up in Ebony's apartment, watching all the horror unfolding from the fifth floor. I told Jess that I was fine, too, then, with tears streaming down my face, told her that Sandor and Marta were gone. I went on to briefly tell her what the red-haired man had told me, and then told her to stay put with Ebony.
"I'll come to Nashville. I'll find my way down to you guys, no matter what, and no matter how long it takes me. Just stay put, both of you."
With both of their competitive figure skating careers over, the two of them had decided on a radical career change two years earlier, moving down to Nashville to pursue stardom as a country music duo. And before the world had gone to hell, they'd been well on their way to realizing their dream. After a year or so of struggle, they'd attracted the attention of a small record label, who'd just released their first full-length album a few months earlier.
Two of the songs from it had made a national chart list called "Country's Hottest 100," with the second one climbing as high as number forty-four and holding steady there for two weeks before dropping, earning them a photo and a mention in the "Newcomers to Watch" section of the nation's best-selling country music magazine. The record label had already signed them on for another album, and a large-scale national tour was planned.
My own voice wasn't half-bad at all, and in the early days of their endeavor, Jess and Eb had begged me to make their duo a trio, but I'd remained in Detroit. My own competitive figure skating career wasn't over yet, because I couldn't let it be. I felt like I still had something to prove. I was going for my third Olympics, and this time, I was determined to not return home with anything less than gold. Fate and random misfortune weren't going to snatch it from my hands this time.
Besides, I still had my scholarship program in Detroit to run, and it had become as important to me as my dream of Olympic gold. Maybe even a bit more important. It had all started after my first Olympics, when I was seventeen. Along with a dozen other skaters, I'd done a national exhibition tour called "Champions on Ice," and our final stop had been an events center in suburban Detroit.
A sold-out hometown crowd had come to see me and my Olympic teammates, and after the show, I'd made my way along the boards, signing autographs, collecting teddy bears and flowers, and letting people take pictures of me with my bronze medal around my neck. One little girl of about ten or eleven gave me a pink carnation, saying that when her mom could afford it, she was going to take figure skating lessons so that she could learn to skate like me.
The comment kind of stopped me dead in my tracks, hurting and melting my heart at the same time, and I'd reached to take the little girl's hand to give it a squeeze, but the swelling, jostling crowd down by the boards had already pushed her along.
For the next several weeks, I hadn't been able to stop thinking about the little girl, what she'd said, and the fact that I had enough money in the bank to pay for figure skating lessons for tens of thousands of kids who might never be able to afford them otherwise.
At seventeen years old, I was a millionaire ten times over. The bulk of the money was from inheriting my parents' estate when they'd been killed. My dad had been a world-renowned neurosurgeon, and my mom a pediatric cancer specialist, and together they'd not only made a very good living, but had also made a few incredibly brilliant stock market investments.
However, a good chunk of the money, at least two million, I'd earned myself, through post-Olympic appearances, skating shows, and product endorsements. I'd even done a TV commercial for a popular breakfast cereal and had my smiling face plastered all over millions of boxes. With old rules preventing pro athletes from participating in future Olympics having long since been abolished, I'd been free to earn as much money as I'd wanted.
I'd had many long talks with Sandor and Marta. I'd spent many nights researching nonprofits and different charity groups, and making plans, and I'd spent many more nights wondering if I was doing the right thing with my money and my parents' money, or if my plans were foolish and pointless and would all end in failure.
I fired my business manager when he'd called my plans "absolute idiocy" right to my face. I fired my agent when I'd overheard her telling Sandor and Marta that I was a "very talented but very silly girl." I even fired my home-school high school tutor when she'd asked me if I couldn't think of anything better to do with my money than "give it to icky, grubby city kids." I'd spent a few weeks crying, off and on a lot. I'd had more talks with Sandor and Marta, and a few of my parents' friends.
Ultimately, several months after my eighteenth birthday, I'd cut a red ribbon at the opening of Evangeline Blake's Figure Skating Academy, a massive facility with a double rink right smack in the heart of Detroit. Though the neighborhood was definitely a bit on the sketchy side, it wasn't the absolute worst by any means, and I'd insisted upon this location so that all kids in the city would at least have semi-easy access to the academy. Busing kids in and out of the suburbs had seemed too time-consuming and problematic to me, and besides, I wanted all kids who skated at the facility to have some kind of a sense of ownership of it, to feel that it was theirs.
The scholarship program was simple. If they demonstrated economic need, which most people did in Detroit, then kids, or their parents for very young kids, were simply asked to write a note or letter stating why they wanted skating lessons. There were no wrong answers. They also had to state that they would abide by the rules of the rink.
Very young kids were off the hook as far as scholarship eligibility via school performance, but all kids in first grade through high school had to sign a contract stating that they would keep their grades at Cs or above and would provide rink staff with copies of all report cards.
If their grades fell below Cs, there would be many chances to get grades up to par. Free tutoring and educational counseling would also be offered. Only in the case of clear-cut willful refusal to raise grades would a skating lesson scholarship be terminated.
In exchange for compliance with these things, each child was given a lifetime scholarship that would cover everything from skates to skating clothes to lessons by highly experienced instructors, all the way to costumes and travel fees once a child reached competitive level.
Several dozen kids did reach that level after the rink had been in operation for a few years. One of these kids was Michelle, the little girl who'd set the whole academy in motion with what she'd said to me after the post-Olympic show. On the academy's opening day, she and her mom had been the very first ones in a line of kids and parents that snaked down blocks. They'd been waiting since five in the morning, fearing a first-come, first-serve basis for a limited number of scholarships.
In addition to having two rinks, the skating academy also boasted a cafeteria where any kids from the city could come for a free daily dinner, as well as free breakfast, lunch, and dinner on weekends. The food definitely wasn't gourmet, but it was nutritious, and on days when school wasn't in session, a meal at the rink might be the only meal a child would get all day. The cafeteria staff also handed out take-home "go-packs" filled with fruit cups and packets of trail mix to kids who were insecure about their food situation at home.
The facility also had an after-school tutoring center, a part-time mental health counselor that any child or parent could make an appointment to talk to, and a large karate studio for community kids who weren't into figure skating.
Drug and alcohol-free teen parties and dances were held twice a month in a three-thousand-square-foot "rec room," which was always supervised by the academy's own security team, who were also in charge of walking kids from and to various city bus stops before and after lessons.
Building all this had cost millions, and the remainder of my money, which I'd invested, would keep the rink and its various programs up and running indefinitely. Which was a very good thing, since the number of kids enrolled in the scholarship program only grew and grew with each passing year, eventually swelling to six hundred, keeping my four full-time skating instructors insanely busy.
All that was what had been going on in my life when the world had gone to hell. I'd been twenty-three years old, in my fifth year of running a large, non-profit enterprise, the only one of its kind in the nation, and two years away from likely competing in my third Olympics.
With many in the figure skating world saying I was in the best shape of my life, I was training up to thirty hours a week while spending almost as many hours a week running the academy with Sandor and Marta, even teaching several weekly skating classes myself. Also, for the fifth time in my life, I was the reigning senior national champion, which required occasional travel for appearances.
After I'd repeatedly told Jess to stay put with Ebony in Nashville, the phone line went dead, and that was the last of the phone service. It would never be restored.
After waiting a week for the animal shifters to return, I began running low on food and knew I couldn't wait for rescue any longer. I packed a suitcase with clothes, the remainder of my food, and other supplies, and left my apartment, bound for Nashville, where I intended to drive in my large SUV. The fact that I hadn't seen many vehicles on the street below my apartment since the undead had risen had almost encouraged me, because I figured that I'd have a quick, clear drive down south. How wrong I was.
But even before getting on the road and figuring out exactly how wrong I was, I did something else first. After leaving my apartment building and making my way to the parking garage with my suitcase, mercifully not encountering any of the undead, I got in my shiny white SUV and started driving to the rink, immediately encountering two Husk People that I swerved to avoid, shuddering.
I encountered many more of them in the incredibly eerie, nearly-empty, sunlit streets on the way to the rink, but I didn't see any shifters. Whatever had become of them, I could only imagine, and what I imagined wasn't good.
When I got to the rink around four in the afternoon, I parked right up by the main entrance, just praying that I'd find some of my skaters and staff members inside. Being that business break-ins were all too frequent in Detroit, the rink was never without one of my security team members on patrol, twenty-four hours a day; and I hoped that when the virus had hit, one of them had been there to lead survivors inside, to safety.
I'd always told all my skaters that the rink was a "designated safe space," where they could come no matter what time of day or night it was, and they would be protected. Over the years, many kids had sought refuge at the rink after being threatened with violence in their neighborhoods or after experiencing violence at home; so I was confident that even in the midst of all the absolute chaos of the previous couple weeks, some of them had remembered my promise of safety at the rink.
However, when I unlocked the double doors of the main entrance and stepped inside the vast foyer, the only thing that greeted me was perfect silence. The lights were on in the building, though, probably running on the generator, which I took as a positive sign, so I began making my way to the cafeteria, hearing distant noise that encouraged me further.
I found one of my security team members lurching around between the numerous long tables, still in uniform, gray-faced and groaning, clearly undead. If his appearance hadn't convinced me, the stench of his rotting flesh would have. When he saw me, he began stumbling over to me, groaning even louder, and I clutched the screwdriver I'd brought in with me to use as a weapon in case of the worst.
With my heartbeat accelerating and my heart breaking at once, I lunged and stabbed Mr. Marcus, as all the kids called him, right in his left eye the moment he got close enough for me to do so. A muscular, tall older gentleman with a deep, resonating laugh, he'd been working security at the rink since the day we'd opened. Before that, he'd served as a Detroit police officer for thirty-one years.
In Rink A, I found two of my skaters, ten-year-old twin sisters, undead, and I killed them both, weeping. Nearby, I found their fifteen-year old brother, who'd recently earned his black belt at the academy's karate studio and planned to become a karate teacher himself someday. Hissing, fangs bared, he lunged to bite me at the same time I was lunging at him, but he wasn't fast enough.
I buried the silver of my screwdriver in the left side of his chest, stabbing him through the heart, before he could bite me, drink my blood, and transmit the virus that would turn me into one of the undead as well.
In Rink B, lurching around near the bleacher area, I found one of my instructors, a young woman my age who'd been a junior national pairs skating champion before a back injury had ended her career at age eighteen. Beneath the bleachers, a twelve-year-old girl who was a new student at the karate studio greeted me with a hiss. I did what I needed to do to both of them, still weeping.
A further search of the vast building soon yielded three more members of the undead, two of them snarling toddlers with ashen faces and tiny glinting fangs. Not far away was their mother, a petite young woman who'd recently signed herself and the two kids up for parent-tot skating classes.
She was only nineteen, and had told me she was making a fresh start after a lifetime of "getting knocked around," as she'd put it. I'd told her that if she felt threatened ever again, to come to the rink for safety, day or night, if she couldn't or didn't want to go to the police.
In the "rec room," I found and dispatched a thirteen-year-old boy who was the best male skater at the academy. Further into the building, I found and dispatched a slender young man I didn't recognize and two children, a boy and a girl, I didn't know either.
My tears began falling anew when I noticed an index card inside a plastic bag hanging from a slender chain around the little boy's neck. The card read: My name is Davion, and I'm four years old. My grandma has the fever and can't take care of me anymore. Please help me and take me someplace safe.
In a staff bathroom, I found another of my skating instructors, this one hanging from a rope attached to a stall, though she was clearly undead, kicking and hissing with fangs bared. On the mirror, with a bar of soap, she'd written I know it's all just a bad dream, but I can't wake up.
After stabbing her through the eye, I undid the knot securing her noose to the stall and lowered her corpse to the tile floor. In the karate studio, I found Michelle's mom and dispatched her with a screwdriver stab to the heart as she tried in vain to grab my throat, groaning and gurgling.
Being that my office was the only place I hadn't looked by this point, I knew this was where I'd find Michelle, and I did. Moaning, she was staggering around, gray-faced, flesh showing clear signs of rot. She hissed when she saw me, revealing razor-sharp fangs.
Sobbing the hardest I had yet, I held her back from me with a hand on her chest while I drove my screwdriver deep into one of her eyes. As the others had, she collapsed instantly and fell to the floor in a heap. Dead at fifteen, and by the looks of things, she'd been dead for days.
After covering all the corpses with towels and blankets, exhausted, heartbroken, and sickened by everything I'd just had to do, I spent the night in the foyer with the double doors locked, hoping against hope that more non-infected survivors like me would show up, and I could help them.
With literally tons of canned food in the cafeteria kitchen, I figured a group of survivors could hole up in the rink for a year if need be. Until the government, or the military, or whoever, got things under control and made everything safe again, if they were ever going to, which I was beginning to doubt more and more.
When not a single fellow survivor had knocked on the double doors by noon the following day, I'd left the rink, posting a large poster-board sign on one of the doors. All survivors welcome. Key beneath white stone planter nearby. Food in kitchen. Showers. Laundry facilities. Industrial generator and back-up generator. Clothing for kids and adults. Help self to all.
Good luck.
E. Blake, owner.
PS- Corpses of undead that I killed inside. I apologize, but you will have to remove them yourself if you want to shelter here permanently.
I can't spare the time, because my sisters are alive in Nashville, and I need to get to them quickly. Please be as respectful as possible when moving/burying the bodies. Many of these people were my friends, and the rest deserve respect, too. Thank you.
I'd decided to leave the key under the planter instead of just leaving the doors unlocked so that random Husk People couldn't shamble on in to the rink, possibly attacking any survivors who later entered.
Driving out of Detroit in my SUV had been fairly easy and uneventful. I'd picked up a desperately-waving family of five along the way, a middle-aged mom and dad and three teenaged sons, and then had taken them to the mom's parents' house on Nine Mile Road in Warren.
Almost immediately after, a grandfather and grandson pair flagged me down and begged for a ride to West Bloomfield, and I took them. After that, I didn't give anyone else any more rides. Leaning on his cane in my passenger seat, the grandfather had told me I shouldn't.
"These are dark, dark days, Miss," he'd said. "You women are now a small, small minority of folks left in the world, and there are already groups of men roaming around, up to no good, if you understand me. Best to head to where you're headed without stopping."
I did, driving at least a hundred miles south before nearly running out of gas. An elderly man running a tiny gas station pretty much in the middle of nowhere filled my tank and gave me a gallon container filled with gas as well, very kindly refusing any form of payment, saying that survivors had to stick together. I'd stopped only because he was so elderly and wizened that I was fairly confident he wouldn't try to pull anything on me.
I was in the uninhabited boonies of northern Ohio when I ran out of gas again, having used the spare gallon a ways back. Not knowing what else to do, I transferred the contents of my suitcase to a duffel bag in the back of my SUV and continued on foot, terrified but determined.
For the next nearly two years, I killed hundreds of Huskers while continuing to head south in fits and starts, having to shelter in abandoned houses and factories during the winter months, when it was just too cold and snowy to keep going. I foraged for wild berries, helped myself to fruit from orchards, and took lots of canned food from empty houses. Farmhouses tended to have particularly good supplies, though some had already been scavenged by the time I arrived.
I met good survivors, like four brothers who escorted me through a ten-mile stretch of Ohio, with the oldest saying that there were far too many male predators in the area for them to have a clean conscience doing otherwise.
I met far less moral survivors and had a few narrow escapes. I sometimes stayed with various groups of wandering elderly and mixed-gender survivors for a week or two at a time, once for three weeks when I'd been sick with a deep, rattling chest cough that had weakened me.
But mostly, I just traveled by myself and hid from other survivors, not wanting to find out if they were the good or bad kind of people. And always, inevitably, I continued heading south, to Nashville.
* * *
Presently, in a vast grassland in southern Kentucky, I was oh-so-close. I wasn't positive, but I was pretty sure the Tennessee border was only about twenty or thirty miles away. But also presently, I was boxed in by sixteen or seventeen men. Men who I was certain were going to rape me, possibly killing me in the process, whether intentionally or not. And even if I could take out one of them with the screwdriver I'd come to call Phillip, I knew that wouldn't do much. There would still be fifteen or sixteen men left to contend with.
Brandishing Phillip, I shouted at the advancing men again, trying my best to be threatening and tough while mentally being in absolute anguish. "I'm going to kill one of you; I swear it!"
My sisters were waiting for me. I'd come so close. All for nothing. Just for horrendous violation and possible death. But I felt like I owed it to myself, my parents, Jess and Eb, Sandor and Marta, and everyone else who'd ever loved me to not just lie down and volunteer for the inevitable. I had to kill as many men as I could first. I had to try. Especially if there was a chance that me killing even one of the men might spare another woman from being raped.
When the fastest man, who'd come from the west, reached me, I thrust Phillip's point in his direction with a grunt, and I did connect with my target, stabbing him. For just a split-second, I felt the familiar jolt that came along with stabbing, followed by the immediate feel of flesh giving way.
However, nearly at the same time time that I'd been stabbing him, the man had been attacking me, clothes-lining me with one meaty arm. I went down backward, and I went down hard, hitting my head on something that felt like a brick. Before losing consciousness, which I did within a fraction of a second, I heard a curious sound. It was a loud, clear roar.