Page 17 of Zocopalypse (Death Fields 1)

I spare Wyatt a glance and grab my bag, daring him to challenge my strength. I bite back the desire to tell him to “fuck off.” I don’t need to. The dead Eater says everything. Even so, with my hand on the front door I can’t help but say, “Sure you want to split up?”

Chapter Eighteen

~Before~

7 Weeks Ago

The graduation party is truly the end of the world as we know it. I make it home unnoticed by pressing flat against a tree in the woods, hiding from the helicopter search lights that comb our neighborhood looking for anything out of the ordinary. I use the spare key to get in the back door of the house. I hug my friends, all three drunk and unsteady on our feet, and I close the door quietly.

I sneak past my mother. She’s fallen asleep in front of the news, flour streaked on her face. The “news” is now more of a continuous loop than anything else. Under the covers of my bed I relive my speech. The way it felt. The way my classmates embraced it—and me. It may have been better than the real thing in some sort of John Hughes version of the apocalypse.

In the morning, with a pounding punch-fueled headache, the text I sent to Liza told me shit has hit the fan at her house.

Busted.

One word. I wait for more but nothing comes.

“Hey, Mom,” I say, finding her in the kitchen. She’s at the counter next to the pantry with a sheet of paper in one hand and a pencil in the other. I walk to the refrigerator, looking for milk and find barely half a cup. “Is there any more milk?”

“No, honey,” she says with a heavy sigh.

I close the refrigerator door, empty handed. “What are you doing?”

“Inventorying our food. Seeing how much we have—the news says the grocery stores are pretty wiped out, but I’m not sure how long we can feasibly go.”

I guess I should be glad she’s snapped out of denial baking but the worry lines on her face are deeper and her hands tremble when she makes a note on her paper. She’s panicking and that makes me uneasy. My mother isn’t one to overreact. If anything she likes to pretend everything is fine and normal. Whatever is easiest. Inventorying our house isn’t easy.

“Mom, when is Dad coming home?” I haven’t brought it up in days. It’s beyond clear now that he’s knee-deep trying to cure the E-TR virus. It’s even clearer that at some point he involved me in the testing. The thought makes me realize it’s Thursday. Shot day. Dad hasn’t been home since my last injection.

“I don’t know. I hope today. Maybe tomorrow. They’re getting close to a breakthrough, I think.” She clutches my arm. “Don’t tell anyone I said that.”

“I won’t. Who would I tell?” I laugh. The sound falls flat.

“Help me sort these canned goods and pull out anything else we have. I want to have a good idea of what we have and how to ration it.”

“You think it will go that far?” I ask taking two cans of beans from her and a bag of rice.

She turns and places her hand on my cheek, her blue eyes meeting mine. “It already has.”

Chapter Nineteen

~Now~

We head to the reservoir, passing a handful of other travelers and one convoy of military vehicles. We spot the army green trucks barreling down the hill and Wyatt pulls the truck quickly to the edge of the road under a grove of shade trees.

“Why are you hiding?” I ask. It isn’t that I disapprove, I’m just curious about his motives. He doesn’t know what I’ve seen.

“Last I heard the military is hoping to round everyone up to the evacuation centers. That’s not really a detour I’m planning to make.” He tilts his head in my direction. “You have a problem with that?”

“Nope.” I don’t explain further.

The convoy passes and we wait a few minutes just to be safe. Wyatt revs the truck to life and eases back onto the road. We’re on one of the lesser traveled highways—sort of off the beaten path. Before we lost the news it was clear the main highways were a mess. Typical apocalypse stuff: traffic jams, wrecks, an overturned tractor-trailer. Sometimes the movies do get something right. The back roads are easier. Encounter a stalled out car? Drive around it and keep going. The problem is the never ending trailers and houses that line the two-lane highways. God knows if they’re empty, filled with survivors or just a breeding ground for Eaters. We agreed early on to avoid them.

“Have you been to the reservoir before?” I ask.

“No, but I have a map.”

“Well, I have been there—a bunch of times. What are we looking for? A place to camp over night?”

---