WILLA, стр. 20

14.

For a brief instant, I thought the noise from the gun battle below me was just a dream. I hadn’t been dreaming about firearms, but that didn’t mean that my brain hadn’t inserted the weapons. Odd things happened in my dreams all the time. I rarely remember them. When I did, I could only conjure up vague images. Yet, many times upon waking, I’d have this feeling that I’d experienced something strange in the night, or wake with the sounds of my dream fading in my ear.

That’s what I thought was happening when I first woke from my nap. Dreams that I had while napping always seemed more real. I guessed it was because I rarely fell into a deep sleep when resting.

It took my brain a half a minute to realize that the sound of the gunshots wasn’t fading but getting louder and more insistent.

“What the hell,” I said to no one and scrambled off the bed.

The light through Grandma’s window was fading. I’d been asleep for a long time, it appeared. While I’d napped, my world had imploded.

Like an idiot, instead of running away from the sounds of fighting, I ran toward it. As I bounded down the stairs, I saw that the front door was open, giving me a full view of the circle barrier on that side of the house and the nearly ten zombies dangling from spikes that stuck out of the fence line.

My first thought was that one of the creatures had gotten past the barrier and into the house. I was just wondering where I should run when I rounded the bottom of the stairs and saw my Uncle Jamie, my grandma, and three of my cousins standing in the living room. The five of them stood in the archway to the kitchen with their backs to me. Their guns pointed at a barricaded cellar door.

I froze. I could do nothing but stand and watch each of my remaining family members flinch every so often as something bumped the door.

It couldn’t be.

We were safe.

I looked out the front door again to make sure none of the creatures were crossing the yard to us. Those gunshots were loud enough to get the attention of zombies that were miles from here.

Nothing was on the porch or in the yard that I could see. In the distance, I could make out a few shapes, but at the slow pace that they were ambling toward us, it would be a bit before they got to the house.

I turned back to my family. No one had noticed me. All of them stared intently at the cellar door.

“What happened?” I asked.

My question came out shakily and a bit on the low side, but in the silence of the living room, the words were booming. All five of my remaining family members jumped and spun to look at me.

One of my cousins, Kayla, fired off a random shot when she jumped. Luckily, the bullet went wild and landed in the stairway.

“You scared the shit out of me,” Kayla said.

“Did you let Jace in the house?” my grandma demanded.

If she hadn’t had a gun in her hand and if noises from the cellar hadn’t drawn her attention back to the kitchen, I think she might have come at me.

“No. I haven’t seen Jace since he and his family left over a month ago. Why? Did he come back?” I asked, examining their terrified faces before returning my attention to the barricade.

“He sure the hell did,” Grandma said. “The little shit had a bite wound. He snuck back into the house, turned, and—well, you can guess the rest,” she said, pointing at the cellar door.

“Momma?” I asked.

I was too shocked by the implication to cry at that moment.

“She’s gone,” Grandma said, moving to pull me into a hug.

Grandma had said the words so calmly, but I could see the panic and pain in her eyes.

“How?” I asked, not hugging her back.

I didn’t think I could move my arms. They felt heavy and numb.

“We aren’t sure. All of us were on guard duty, and Grandma was at the coup, feeding the chickens. Everything was quiet one minute, and the next, we heard a scream from downstairs. The ones he bit must have turned rather quickly, though, if you were upstairs and the five of us were here, that didn’t leave many people for him to attack. What, six people?” Kayla asked, looking at each of us in turn and making a mental calculation of the number of people who were still alive.

“All Jace had to do was turn two other people, and he had a small enough army to take care of the rest. Most of the people down there were sleeping because they’d been on watch last night,” my cousin Chase said, looking at the door.

His father, my Uncle Carson, was down there, along with his mom. Luckily, his brother Sam was standing beside him with his hand on Chase’s shoulder.

“My God,” I whispered.

As I took in the number of people in the room, I realized that neither of Uncle Jamie’s sons nor his wife had made it out of the cellar. I looked at my uncle to see how he was holding up. His face was stoic, but his eyes shone with fear, anger, and sorrow.

No one said anything for a long time.

Grandma held tight to Kayla and me while the boys watched the cellar door, and Uncle Jamie walked the wrap-around porch, searching for a break in our barrier. When he returned, he looked puzzled