Chapter 5: Fevered Choices
The silence after the barricade was heavy, a thick blanket woven from our own pounding hearts. We’d shoved the heavy dresser against the bedroom door, then angled Ellie’s drafting table behind it for good measure. It wouldn’t hold against a real horde, but it would give us warning.
We were dressed now. Jeans, boots, sturdy shirts. The normalcy of pulling on socks felt absurd. Ellie’s hands trembled slightly as she laced her boots.
“We need to know,” I said, my voice too loud in the hushed room. I was looking at the window, or what was left of it. We’d nailed a blanket over the gap, but it was a gesture, not a solution.
Mary nodded, already at her sketchbook. She’d torn out a page and was drawing a rough map of our property. “Perimeter check. Methodical. We go out the front, stick to the tree line, circle to the back. Assess threats, identify resources.”
“You’re not going out there,” Ellie said, the words sharp with fear. She was looking at me, then at Mary.
“We have to, Mom,” Mary said, not looking up from her map. “The house isn’t secure. That thing didn’t teleport here. It walked. Which means others can walk here. We need to see what ‘here’ is.”
Nancy was sitting on the edge of the bed, her arms wrapped around herself. She stared at the dark stain on the floorboards where the thing had bled. “It was Mr. Henderson.”
We all stopped.
“What?” Ellie whispered.
“The plaid shirt. The wedding ring. It was Mr. Henderson from down the road.” Nancy’s voice was flat, detached. “He always waved when he mowed his lawn.”
The fact landed in the center of the room, cold and lethal. This wasn’t a random monster. It was our retired neighbor, a man who’d given us tomatoes from his garden last summer.
The world didn’t end with a bang. It ended with Mr. Henderson, milky-eyed and hungry, clawing through your bedroom window.
“That means…” Ellie began, then stopped, unable to finish the thought.
“It means the infection, or whatever it is, is local. Widespread.” I finished for her. “We operate on that assumption until proven otherwise.”
The logic was a cold comfort, but it was a structure. We could build actions on it.
“Okay,” I said, clapping my hands once, a sound that made everyone jump. “New division of labor. Mary and I will do the perimeter recon. Ellie, Nancy, you secure this room as a fallback point. Then, inventory everything in the kitchen. Food, water, medicine. Assume we won’t get more.”
Ellie stood, her nurturing instinct forging itself into something harder. “Okay. We can do that.” She looked at Nancy. “Sweetheart?”
Nancy uncurled herself. “I’ll find the coolers and the camping jugs. We’ll fill everything with water.”
“Good,” I said.
Mary handed me a hammer from the tool kit we kept in the closet. It was no lamp post, but it was balanced and solid. She took a sturdy screwdriver for herself, testing its weight.
We didn’t make a big show of leaving. No dramatic farewells. I kissed Ellie, hard and quick, tasting the fear on her lips. She squeezed my hand, her grip fierce. Nancy hugged Mary, whispering, “Five-meter visibility, remember? You said always maintain five-meter visibility in unknown terrain.”
Mary nodded. “I remember.”
Then we were at the bedroom door, moving the barricade just enough to slip out into the hall. The house felt different. It was no longer a sanctuary; it was a container of unfamiliar shadows. The silence was a physical pressure. No hum of the refrigerator. No tick of the grandfather clock in the hall—Ellie must have forgotten to wind it.
We moved through the living room, past the familiar couch where we’d watched movies, the coffee table scarred from the girls’ art projects. Everything was achingly normal and utterly wrong.
I turned the deadbolt on the front door. The click was catastrophic in the quiet. We listened. Nothing but the wind in the pines.
“Ready?” I breathed.
Mary’s jaw was set. She looked so much like me in that moment it stole my breath. “Ready.”
We opened the door and stepped onto the porch.
The morning air was clean, sharp with the scent of pine and damp earth. It was so at odds with the rot in our bedroom it was disorienting. Our street was still. No cars moved. No sprinklers whirred. A few houses down, a car door hung open, the interior light long dead.
We moved off the porch, keeping low, sticking to the line where our manicured lawn met the wilder ferns and trees. The first thing we saw was the trail. A path of trampled grass and broken bracken led from the Henderson property line straight to our side window.
“He came in a straight line,” Mary murmured. “No deviation. Just… purpose.”
We followed the edge of the property, our backs to the rough bark of the pines. The Henderson house was visible through the trees. The front door was smashed inward. A dark shape lay on the walkway. It didn’t move.
Further down the street, a figure shambled across a distant driveway. It moved with that slow, relentless gait we now knew too well. It was Mrs. Lowell, in her housedress and apron. She paused, head turning lazily, then continued her aimless pilgrimage.
My stomach turned to ice. It was everywhere.
“No signs of organized response,” Mary stated clinically, but her eyes were wide, taking it all in. “No emergency broadcasts on the car radios we could hear. No sirens. No aircraft. This is a systemic collapse.”
We completed the circuit at the back of our property. Our shed was intact. The garden was undisturbed, Ellie’s tomatoes still small and green on the vine. The normalcy was grotesque.
As we rounded the corner to slip back to the front door, we saw it. On our own porch, shuffling awkwardly, its back to us. A teenager in the remains of a fast-food uniform. It was pawing at our front door.
Mary froze. I gripped the hammer.
It must have heard us. It turned. Its face was a nightmare of crusted blood, one cheek partially torn away. It let out a wet, gurgling hiss and stumbled down the porch steps, arms rising.
“The hammer. The temple, or the spine at the base of the skull,” Mary whispered, her voice a tight wire. “Maximum disruption to motor function.”
It was twenty feet away. Fifteen.
Then, a sudden, sharp crack from above. A flower pot—one of Ellie’s terracotta geranium planters—sailed down from our bedroom window and shattered on the paved walkway right in front of the thing.
The zombie halted, confused by the sudden noise and movement.
I didn’t hesitate. I closed the distance in three long strides and swung the hammer in a short, brutal arc. It connected with the side of its head with a sound like a dropped melon. The thing dropped, twitched once, and was still.
I looked up. Ellie and Nancy were at the broken window, Ellie’s arm still outstretched from the throw. Nancy’s hand was over her mouth.
Mary was already dragging the body by its ankles off the path, into the ferns. “Improvised auditory distraction. Effective,” she panted.
We sprinted for the front door, slammed it behind us, and locked the world out again. We stood in the dark foyer, backs against the door, breathing in great, ragged gulps.
Upstairs, I could hear Ellie and Nancy already moving furniture again, reinforcing our barricade.
Mary looked at me, her face pale but composed. “The perimeter is compromised. Resources outside are inaccessible without high risk. The Henderson and Lowell residences are confirmed hostile. Probability of other infected in the neighborhood is near one hundred percent.”
I just nodded, the hammer hanging heavy in my sweat-slick hand. The facts were a cage settling around us.
“We’re on our own,” I said.
From the kitchen, we could hear the sound of cabinets opening, of cans being stacked on the counter. Ellie and Nancy were building a different kind of wall. One made of beans, soup, and hope.
For now, it would have to be enough.