WILLA, стр. 31

“Like what?” Sam asked.

“I don’t think this is an appropriate conversation...”

Uncle Jamie looked to Chase again. The boy still wasn’t looking at us.

“I think we need to know if we’re going to be on the move for a while,” Sam said.

I hated agreeing with him.

“Okay. Those creatures have overrun the city, as I said. I saw at least a few thousand zombies. I don’t know where they all came from or why they are there. That many people couldn’t have turned in town at the same time. I think the creatures are drawn to the city. They’re probably flocking to all of the major population areas. Out here, we can almost forget that anything happened, but not there. The town looks just like a scene from an old zombie movie—zombies as far as the eye can see.

“The only good thing is that there are so many zombies that they have a hard time smelling us surrounded by so much decay. Some people took advantage of that. They covered themselves in dead flesh, and the clothes of zombies and are walking around among the dead.”

“And that works?” Sam asked.

“As far as I could tell,” our uncle said.

“It might be a good idea if we don’t bathe that often then. Just the parts that matter. If we stink as they do, then maybe we can repel them or go unnoticed,” Sam suggested.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw that at last, our conversation had gotten Chase’s attention. Good. If he doesn’t fight, maybe he’ll at least go along with the not bathing plan. Not that it would be much different from the way we were currently living. We hadn’t cleaned ourselves that often since leaving Grandma’s house. We hadn’t had access to enough water to fully immerse ourselves in a shower or bath in a long time.

As Sam said, we’d mostly been washing the crucial parts, but when I could, I scrubbed my face, neck, arms, legs, and cleaned my ears. I guess we wouldn’t be doing that much anymore. I’d never been as dirty as I was at the moment, and I couldn’t imagine letting myself get any dirtier.

“Why do you think there are so many in town,” I asked, not wanting to talk about the odd things people were doing anymore.

“I met a few survivors who say the creatures are migrating. First, they moved out of rural areas to the cities to find food, and now that they’ve run out, they’re moving west. At first, in dribs and drabs like we’d seen come to the farm, but the groups are getting bigger. That’s probably why those people were trying to lure more out of the city. With some leaving on their own, they’re probably hoping to hurry the migration along. That isn’t a bad idea in theory. Unfortunately, there are so many and others coming in, that it would take them a year or more to get the creatures out of the city.”

“Why are the zombies moving west?” Sam asked.

“The outbreak started here on the east coast, so I guess they are hoping they’ll find better prey out west.”

“If that’s the case, then we should go east,” I said.

“That’s what I was thinking as well,” Uncle Jamie said, pulling out a map and finding our location. “We don’t have any known family in that direction, so I’m not sure where we should go.”

“Did anyone in town talk about safe places people were going?” I asked.

“Nope. Any that they’d heard of had fallen by the time they found them. Some had even heard of our farm, but I informed them that it had burned to the ground. I don’t know if they believed me, but most seemed to because I didn’t have a reason to lie. I don’t think anywhere is truly safe anymore.”

“Then why do we even bother?” Chase asked, and we all turned to him in shock.

“Because we have to,” I said before anyone else could speak up. “We can’t let the zombies have this world. Not without a fight. We have to live for as long as we can.”

“But we’re all going to die,” Chase argued.

“We were going to die before as well. No one gets out of this world alive,” Sam said.

“But now we’re going to die horribly.”

“The chances of going that way in the old world were high as well. The only difference is that now death is staring us in the face. It’s imminent, whereas then, for most people, it was unknown.”

Sam had a point. It didn’t make Chase or I feel that much better about our situation, but it did put things into perspective some. The fight for survival was just a bit harder these days. That was all.

Without realizing it, the thought calmed me some, and as soon as I lay down, I was asleep. I dreamed of my life in the old world. I dreamed of Daddy taking me to Nashville to see Metallica live in concert, of Mom taking me to get a dress for a school dance, of my friends acting like fools, of the boy I had a crush on, of Grandma making me peach cobbler and ice cream. I even dreamed of failing a test that I knew I should’ve studied more for, and of giving an oral report on my favorite book, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.