H1Z1 - Chapter 5

Although he didn't want to, I pulled Bill to a stop just outside the automatic doors to the store. For a moment, the two of us just stood there, nothing but the sound of our own gasps for air and the thundering of our hearts in our ears.

"Dad," Bill managed between gulps of air, "She was, sh-she was ..."

"Yes, Son," I replied, myself struggling to fill my lungs with clean, cool early-morning air. "She was dead. And then she was standing up again."

Bill just stared at me. I could only respond by staring at him. I think we each could see the gears in each others' minds turning and turning, trying to fit the sentence I had just managed to spit out into our conception of How the World Works.

Bill, being ten, and therefore much more resilient than I was at my almost-mid-life age, straightened up and with a deep breath asked, "Well, what do we do about that?"

It's amazing how quickly and easily my young son can assimilate new facts or situations. It seems to me as though his little mind, so eager for growth and knowledge, just raced through new concepts, filing them neatly under real or not real, fact or fiction, fun or hard work like a computer parsing its next set of instructions. For me, even as my amazement at his rapid acceptance of this terrifying fact, this realization, that a dead woman, a woman who had died from an obviously horrible and most likely highly communicable disease, had risen and ... attacked us - the realization wasn't as easy. It had attacked us. This fact snapped me out of it and back to the here and now.

"What are we going to do ...?" I mused back at him. "First, we call for help, because I think everyone in that store is either just as sick as that lady was or will be very soon, how's that sound?"

Having Daddy announce a definitive action seemed to bolster the boy, who stood a little straighter at the thought of some kind of positive action in the face of this horrible thing he had just seen.

"Why don't you go put the dogs on their leashes and walk them around a little, Son?"

"OK Dad, but I am not letting you out of my sight. That lady scared me bad!"

"Good, I think that's smart." With a mission to perform, the lad was able to settle down some. Besides, the dogs were not small, and Bill always felt safer with his furry friends by his side.

I dug my cell phone out of my pocket and realized it had been off all morning. Although my wife had merely rolled over and mumbled when I kissed her cheek and headed out for the morning's activities, as soon as the phone's operating system booted up, the message alert popped on. You Have Voicemail, it chimed in an artificially cheerful voice. I nearly lost myself in a befuddled rage at that - how could this stupid device be cheery after what I had just seen? I caught myself and instead hit play.

"Honey, did you see the news this morning? Call me now!" Liz was a little high-strung on occasion, but this was real fear in her voice and I wasn't used to hearing that. I dialed immediately.

"There you are!" She yelled into the phone.

"You'll never believe what just happened to us," I gushed at the same moment, relieved to hear her voice and know that she and the rest of our five children were safe.

"You first," We both said at the same time. This was usually my cue to remain silent, but it seemed that she wanted to hear my news because the silence on the line stretched out for a few seconds before I began. "The lady at the outdoor counter in Wad-Mart just died right there in front of us!"

"You have Bill with you? Did he see that?" Ever the protective Mom, she immediately asked after our youngest son.

"Yes dear, and yes, he was with me when it happened, but that wasn't the worst of it - I'm still trying to wrap my head around it all."

"She came back to life, didn't she?" Liz preempted.

"How did you know?" I asked, mystified at her seeming clairvoyance.

"It's all over the news - it's this flu! They're calling it the Zombie flu!"

"I've been hearing about it, but Zombies? I mean, come on!" I replied, my incredulity spilling through the phone and out onto her shoulder.

"No honey, the governor was just on TV - it's what woke me up," I always turned the TV on for her when I left in the morning, usually on the Discovery Channel, as I had this morning, to help her, not much of a morning person, to wake up.

"How'd you hear the governor? I left the TV on Discovery!"

"I know - he came on so I changed the channel. He was on every channel - it was an emergency broadcast. He said that the Zombie flu is here. It's killing people here! You need to come home now! And get Bill a shotgun, too!"

That last part brought me up short. "What do you mean?" I tried to deflect, but my heart sunk as I realized I'd been caught.

"Go back to the gun counter and get Bill a 20 gauge. You know he can't keep a secret."

Damn that motherly instinct. I'd been an idiot to think that she'd not realize I was teaching our son to shoot.

"Get home as fast as you can, honey. I think we all need to get somewhere else - somewhere safe."

"All right. I'll grab another gun, and be there as soon as I can."

I looked toward my son as he wandered around the parking lot following the dogs' noses. Should I bring him back in with me? Into there? I noticed that both of the dogs' hackles were raised and that they weren't sniffing for sign of other animals to cover with their own scent. Quite the opposite, the were both fully on guard, one on either side of the young boy, and were warily searching for the source of the danger they clearly sensed. Yup. Better bring all three of them in - it would be useful, because in the back of my mind I had already accepted that everyone in Wad-Mart today was infected, and every one of them was after one thing and one thing only ... living flesh.

Damn. This today wasn't going to be much fun after all.