WILLA, стр. 36
The sun was full in the sky by the time I left the store. My feet ached from all of the running and walking I’d done the night before, but I made myself move in the direction that I thought was west until I realized that I was stumbling all over the road. Anyone watching me could mistake me for a zombie. That would be a bad thing, considering what was happening to me, but I wasn’t ready to die. Not yet.
West was the direction the zombies were going. If I was going to be one of them, I might as well point my body in the right direction. Besides, my family would be moving east.
I finally crawled into a minivan to rest sometime before dusk. I made sure the doors were shut and locked before eating a bit of food and going to sleep in the backseat. The long bench seat wasn’t comfortable, but I was too exhausted to care. I passed out as soon as my head hit the hard lump that was the backpack I’d filled in the dollar store.
The reason I chose the minivan was two-fold. I hadn’t seen or heard a zombie since leaving the store. I didn’t know if that was because I was turning into one of them, and they no longer sensed me or if there simply weren’t any around. Just in case I was ahead of another horde, and I wasn’t changing, the size of the van would keep the creatures from smelling my bleeding arm. I hoped.
Secondly, Uncle Jamie said that the zombies that had turned inside a vehicle were trapped because they didn’t know how the door handles worked. I figured if I changed in the night, the minivan was as safe a place as any to spend eternity. Sure, if I were strong enough, I might be able to bust out a window, but I doubted, in my condition, that I would wake a strong zombie. The lack of real food would allow me to grow weaker over time.
To my utter shock, I woke human late the next afternoon. The air in the van was stale with a slight, sickly odor, but luckily, we were enjoying a mild winter, so it wasn’t freezing or sweltering. If I hadn’t known that I was human when the fog of sleep first started to lift, hitting the floor between the rows of seats when I tried to stretch, was a dead giveaway. I hit my head on something, cursed, and looked around dazedly before remembering where I was and why I was there.
“I’m still alive,” I said aloud to no one.
My voice was raspy and barely audible, but it was there and better than it had been.
The sound that came from my mouth made my head hurt, and I flinched from the pain. It was then I realized that I hadn’t spoken since screaming my voice away running from the zombies. I’d cried, but mostly silent tears.
Getting off the van’s floor was a bit difficult due to my hurt arm and cramped legs. After a few awkward moves, I was sitting upright in the seat I’d slept on and staring out the front window at an empty world.
“Well, fuck,” I said to drown my growing sense of fear.
I was alone.
I still hadn’t turned, which meant I probably wouldn’t. I’d left my family for no reason. I couldn’t remember the location of the military base that was still taking in survivors, so I had no idea where my family was. Hell, I didn’t even know where I currently was.
“Fuck,” I tried to scream and started to cry again.
Chances were high that I would’ve crawled into a ball and bawled myself to sleep if the urge to pee hadn’t gotten worse the longer I sat there. Grabbing my backpack, I left the vehicle.
I squatted just outside the van to relieve my bladder before surveying the area.
Yep, I was alone, and from the looks of me in the van’s mirrors, I was most definitely still human. A dirty, tear-stained human, but alive nonetheless.
“How can this be?” I asked the person in the mirror, pulling my lips back to see my teeth and opening my eyes wide to check their color.
I knew one of those creatures had bitten me. I knew they had. Hadn’t they? Only one way to find out, I guess.
I was unable to stifle the scream that ripped from my throat when I removed my bandage. Thankfully, I had shut myself up in the van again so that the zombies couldn’t get me if they heard me. The creatures could surround me and keep me trapped inside the vehicle until something else caught their attention, and I could die before that happened, but they couldn’t get to me.
The wound appeared to be just as nasty as it was the day before. Maybe, it wasn’t a bite. I thought as horrible as it looked that it had to be a bite. Nothing else happened during that fight—that I could think of—to cause it. I couldn’t see teeth marks, though. That didn’t necessarily mean anything. If the zombie had torn away enough flesh, it could’ve taken with it any hints that it had sunk its teeth into me. However, as large as the area was, it didn’t look deep enough or wide enough for a creature to do that much damage to me.
Uncle Jamie had said that some people took longer to turn. Maybe, I was going to be one of those people.
I hoped not.
The change was taking too long as it was. My nerves wouldn’t hold out much longer.
To distract myself, I cleaned the wounded area thoroughly, re-bandaged it, and took some pain meds that I’d found in the dollar store. If I somehow survived the next night, I was going to have to get more medical