Page 4 of Immune

For a very useless and dangerous second, I wonder who she was before NOVAC twisted her brain into what she is now. She looks like she could have been a teacher. A mom. Maybe even a nurse. Someone who liked awful music and complained about the price of gas and milk. Someone with a favorite coffee mug and a drawer full of forgotten birthday candles. Someone who thought the world ending was simply propaganda, impossible, out of the realm of reality. Until it wasn’t.

Any lingering sympathy dries up faster than rain in July when her nose twitches, and she’s just another Zed a split second later. I keep perfectly still as I watch her head jerk unnaturally in my direction, a strange, wet clicking sound rattling in the back of her throat.

Zeds don’t scent the way Alphas do. They don’t track sweetness beneath scent blockers or chase the sour scent of fear through the air with the kind of horrifying precision that makes my skin want to crawl clean off my bones. They do smell blood, though. They smell meat, and life, and apparently, even when I’m practically slathered in dirt, smoke, and my own poor choices, I still count as life.

Fuck my day.

Narrowing my eyes on the Zed, I watch carefully as she takes one staggering step, and then another. My fingers tighten around the knife handle, calculating the quietest way to get rid of her if she gets close enough. A blade through the eye socket could work if the angle is right. Maybe under the jaw if she lunges at me. Knee first if I need to bring her down before finishing the job.

Before I’m forced to choose, the distant boom of the burning house splits another crack through the air, somethinginside collapsing with a loud enough roar that birds burst from the rooftops and nearby trees, spilling into the air in panic.

The Zed quickly snaps toward the noise, her ruined body instantly lurching away from me and back to the sound. I wait until she’s bumbling down the road with the other Zeds before I finally move again.

“And that’s on today’s episode where we discuss how predictable these fuckers are,” I whisper to myself, then immediately hate myself for speaking at all. Because talking to Zeds is one thing. Talking to myself is another. Talking to myself in an abandoned street with a limited blocker stash, a half bottle of water, and a stomach that is starting to make similar sounds to the walking dead meandering toward the burning house is probably how people end up wearing necklaces made of ears, naming skulls after childhood friends, and marrying tins of beans.

I refuse to become that type of apocalypse cliché. It’s just not in my repertoire.

Well… unless the beans are the British kind with the small sausages included.

Maybe then I might actually go off the deep end and marry the shit out of them.

Ducked low, I slip from behind the van and cross the street on quiet footsteps, heading for the row of buildings tucked between an old charity shop and a florist that has been empty for so long that the flowers painted over the sign have long since faded. Only the ghost of lettering remains, a sad representation of the world we live in now.

My target, however, awaits three doors down, hidden behind strings of ivy and an awkwardly collapsed awning.

A pharmacy.

Well, what’s left of it, anyway. What remains is a pathetic monument to all things people thought they would have time toneed. The front windows are shattered, but so are many of the buildings in the surrounding area. Most places have been picked clean from the outside in. The good stuff no longer hides in the most obvious places anymore. You have to really dig for it now. Breaking locks to staff doors, checking under counters, in basements, in the backpacks of the dead. I even found a stash of painkillers hidden inside the ceiling tiles of one building, and that was after watching the people who hid it die at the hands of a bloodthirsty hoard of Zeds.

It took me two years to finally learn that lesson, that treasures are found in the most unlikely places, after nearly starving to death in a house that only appeared to have been ransacked. I spent three days there before I accidentally found a hidden storage cupboard behind a bookcase. In that cupboard were three tins of beans, a tin of peaches, two bottles of water, a packet of stale crackers, and a beautiful jar of peanut butter so glorious that I had to stop myself from proposing to it.

We had a wonderful week together, that jar of peanut butter and me.

And then I ate him and only felt mildly guilty over it. But what can you do, huh? Some romances are simply doomed from the very start.

Reaching the pharmacy door, I pause, listening to the silence inside. I can’t hear the drag of feet, no wet snarls, no flies buzzing around something fresh enough to worry about. There aren’t any voices, which is both a relief and worry, because voices mean people, and people mean trouble wearing skin.

Crouching beside the entrance, I pull out a small mirror from the side pocket of my backpack. The plastic casing is cracked to hell, a true testament to how trying these past six years have been, and the handle has been wrapped in tape so much that I don’t even remember what it looked like before. Itdoes the job as I angle it around the broken doorway, using it to scan what little I can see.

Toppled shelves. Debris scattered over the floor. Shattered glass everywhere. An old smear of blood near the counter, turned almost black with age.

There’s no movement, though. And still, I wait another two full minutes before I even consider venturing inside. After all, Maine would always tell me patience was a virtue. Patience was the difference between living and becoming another statistic. He would usually give me that lecture right before doing something stupid and reckless, but I’ve chosen to honor that lesson and ignore the pure hypocrisy Maine was sometimes known for.

When only silence remains, I finally slide inside, keeping light on my feet just in case. I’m grateful for the bandana across my mouth, because the first thing I notice is how stale the air is, dry and thick with dust, mold, and the faintest medical and chemical bitterness that always seems to cling to places like this. I’m fighting for my life as I battle against my watering eyes, trying to ignore it as I step carefully over broken glass and fallen packets of random things people would buy before the world turned to shit.

Vitamins. Cough syrup. Band-Aids.

I snort. Band-Aids won’t do shit against the bite of a ravenous Zed.

Scanning the pharmacy, my gaze snags on a box that turns my stomach. Pregnancy tests. Three boxes of them spilled on the floor, crushed under a toppled display.

I tear my eyes away from them before my mind spirals at the mere sight of them. Because the world is kind of funny, in a way that makes me want to severely punch it in the throat. There was a time when people bought those things hoping for those two magical lines to appear or praying for just theone. Nowadays, successful pregnancies are so rare, so mythic, that most compounds would trade their possessions, blood, and what’s left of their family for one. Omegas are treated like legends with ovaries, horror stories with wombs, and futures people think they have every right to control and own.

There’s no stopping the shiver that skates across my shoulders at the thought, sharp enough that I pause.

Oh hell, please, not now. Any other time but now.

I inhale slowly through my nose, which is kind of stupid with a bandana on and blockers dulling half the world against my senses, but I continue with the habit. In through the nose. Out through the mouth. Count the exits. Count the weapons. Count anything to distract me from my pulse that is ticking much too fast under my jaw.