Taking a few steps forward, he raised his binoculars and adjusted the settings quickly. The dark blue car was nestled under the trees, the front hood bashed up against the battered windshield. The driver's door was buckled, the window smashed out and covered in blood. It was his car. It was the car Brandy had died in.
He lowered the binoculars and took a breath. His mind was whirling with the possibilities of what had happened.
Brandy had realized she was wrong as she drove back to Austin and turned around. She was driving up to the bed and breakfast when the solider lunged out at the car. She swerved to avoid him, slammed into the tree, and broke her leg. The zombie reached through the broken window, grabbed her and…
Eric let out a strangled sob and took another breath.
Maybe that had happened.
Or…
Brandy had made it part of the way to Austin, suffered an attack, and wounded, tried to make it back to the bed and breakfast. But she died of her wounds before she made it up the hill and crashed into the tree.
Maybe.
He rubbed his nose and pushed his glasses up.
Pepe began to eat some grass and Eric pulled him back up onto the road.
It didn't matter what had happened to Brandy. She was gone. Dead. Forever. And he and Pepe were alone in a town full of the dead. The only safe place for now was the house. Of course, how long that would be safe was a whole other story. But he didn't have the heart to move on just yet.
There was still work to be done before he and Brandy could be at peace and he knew that he may not have much time to do it. Burying the dead was now a luxury. Brandy had always loved luxury.
She deserved it.
He would do it.
Fighting down his fear and feeling his determination giving him strength, he walked back up the hill to the farmhouse to bury his love.
Chapter Ten
Despair
Despite himself, despite everything he had planned, despite all that he feared, despite the knowledge that the community center was full of the undead, Eric stayed in the B & B. At first it was because he was in no condition to travel, but after three days, it was because a deep malaise had sunk into his bones.
The night he put Brandy into her grave was the night he fell into bed drunk from three bottles of wine and slept through most of the next day. He woke up dizzy, sick and unsure of where he was for a moment.
Pepe, desperate to relieve himself, was good enough to do it in the bathroom next to the toilet and Eric felt a pang of remorse for letting the dog to suffer. But he could hardly bring himself to crawl out of bed that day. All he wanted to do was lay in the bed, listening to the air conditioner hum, and watch TV.
The day after Brandy's death the networks continued with their live feed. From the expressions on the newscasters' faces and the continuing terrible news, it was obvious there was no going back. The world was ending and the dwindling TV audience, locked up in their homes and rescues centers, watched just like Eric did: in numb silence.
He tried calling his brother in Fort Worth, but the phone rang endlessly and the voicemail never kicked on. His parent's phone in Galveston had a busy signal. His sister's cheery voice exclaimed "hi!" when he called her, but then immediately launched into telling him to leave a number.
Finally, needing food, he had ventured downstairs. The darkness was unnerving and he turned on all the lights to soothe his nerves.
After a meal of leftovers, he sat down at the aging computer in Mrs. Waskom's office and tried to find any other news on the Internet. His email was actually full of messages from friends, but they were now a day old. He answered every email and explained in detail where he was. In his heart, he knew it was a fruitless endeavor, but he had to try. After an hour of responding to emails, he logged onto his IM service. None of his friends, co-workers or family members were logged on.
On his MySpace page he found a message from his sister saying that she was on her way with her kids to his parents' home to ride out the plague. He felt sick to his stomach when he read her message and the busy signal he had encountered whenever he called his folks tormented him. He tried hard not to think of what may have caused the phone to be off the hook even though in his heart he knew what was most likely the truth.
That night, he opened another bottle of wine and tried all night to call his family over and over again.
No one ever answered.
By the next day, the major networks began to carry the feed from the emergency broadcast system. All the channels looped the same information endlessly and the news never seemed to be updated. He checked all the news websites again to find them unchanged. His emails remained unanswered. No new messages were on his MySpace.
A random message came through on his IM service just as he was about to log off.
It read: Are you really there?
His hands trembling, he typed back that he was.
There was a long pause then more words spilled across the text box: I’m afraid. They're outside the door.
Eric let out a long sigh then typed as he spoke aloud, "Are you alone?"
The words from pinkgrrl16 made him sigh sadly: I'm alone. They're all dead. I'm scared. Can you come get me?
Despite himself, Eric typed back, his voice a whisper, "Where are you?" Maybe he was giving her false hope, but if he could do something…
Pepe looked up at Eric with concern. He had been chewing happily on a stuffed toy, probably an antique, he had found on a low table when he noticed the trembling in his human's voice.
"It's a girl, I think, somewhere else. Trapped by the zombies," Eric explained.
The dog continued to chew on the toy's foot, his eyes looking up at Eric thoughtfully.
Pinkgrrl16 wrote: St. Louis. Are you nearby? Can you get me? I can crawl out the window and jump down from the roof.
Eric let out a long, strangled sigh of remorse. "I'm in Texas," he said softly as he typed. "I'm sorry, Pinky."
It seemed painfully long before words in bright pink text wrote out: It's okay. At least I'm not alone.
For thirty minutes, they chatted back and forth. He found out that Pinky was really Stephanie and she was now eighteen, not sixteen, and she was home visiting from college when it had all gone to hell. He told her about Brandy and how Pepe was with him and she told him she was worried about her cat that had run away when the zombies first stormed the house. She was in the attic, behind a thick oak door, on her laptop, hoping the Wi-Fi from the neighbors’ house continued to hold up. Alone, scared and hungry, she was trying to find help when she had found him online via the news forum he had logged onto.
"She's so scared," Eric whispered to Pepe. "I can't do anything."
The dog whined a little and started chewing on the toy's other foot.
He was typing out a message to her when suddenly the word "bye" appeared in the box.
Feeling sick to his stomach, he pressed ENTER to deliver his message and waited.
Despite her online status, she didn't answer.
He typed to her a few more times, but there was no response.
Her status remained online, but idle.
The next morning, groggy and hung over again, he checked online to see if she had ever answered. Her status was still online, but idle. Gibberish filled the text screen. He logged off.
Overwhelmed, he fell to the floor and wept.
Chapter Eleven
Hope
Eric woke up with a cold nose pressed against his own. He groaned and ran a hand over his face feeling the scrubby nastiness of three days of no shaving scrape his palm. He opened his eyes and Pepe's worried expression came into view and he mumbled that he was okay and the little dog jumped down. The sun noon sun was pouring through the bedroom windows and the stained glass threw vibrant colors of the walls.
He had been dreaming about Stephanie and as the last threads of sleep faded from his brain, he let out a soft moan. Rolling off the bed onto the floor, he crawled to the bathroom and threw up. It was probably the best thing for his tired body considering how much he had drank the night before.
Pepe regarded him with a very serious expression on his little face through the whole process and when Eric half fell, half climbed into the shower with his clothes on and turned on the water full force, Pepe actually looked relieved.
Sitting under the slowly warming water, Eric sighed sorrowfully and thought of all that had happened the last few days with a startling amount of clarity despite how much he had been drinking. The despair he had felt overwhelming him the last few days as Brandy's death, the probable deaths of his family, and the end of the world became a reality was still lingering, but was now fought back by his growing determination.
Stephanie had just been a girl home from college. Ten years younger than he was, she had been on the cusp of her great college adventure and the beginning of her adult life. Instead of enjoying her spring break with her family, she had ended up barricaded in an attic trying to escape their hungry undead assault. It had hurt him to know he was her last friend in this life and that he had not been able to help her. But her bravery, her determination, even to the end, to reach out and somehow find help, had touched him.
After he had accepted she was no longer at her computer or safe and perhaps not even alive, he had drank too much and had fallen asleep. He dreamed of her scrambling out the attic window and away from the zombies breaking into through the door. He had watched her through his murky dreamscape climb up onto the top of the roof and sit there, clutching a wind vane as the dead moaned all around her house. And just when she had given up all hope, a helicopter had zoomed down out of the sky and plucked her to safety. As dreams have a tendency to do, his had quickly shifted and he was sitting with Stephanie in the helicopter as Brandy turned in to the pilot's seat to say, "See, we're safe now."