WILLA, стр. 37
After redressing my arm, I forced myself to drink a bottle of water and eat another protein bar. I hated nourishing a body that would soon be dead, but my stomach growled too forcefully for me to ignore.
I thought about hitting the road again once I’d eaten. A voice in the back of my mind told me to go looking for my family. It reassured me that I wasn’t going to turn.
So many times that day, I started after them, but then I’d move, and my arm would hurt, and I’d chicken out and lie back on the seat. Mostly, what I did was doze.
When I woke the next morning still human, I was sure my wound wasn’t a bite mark. At first, the tears that came were of joy. Next came the realization that I’d left my family for no reason. I bawled out of anger, sadness, and fear. I cried so hard that I threw up in one of the van’s middle seats. The smell of which and my need to urinate again forced me out of the vehicle.
Despite knowing that there was only a slim chance of me ever finding my Uncle Jamie and cousins, I located a road sign that told me where I was, and I headed east. I only stopped when I needed to relieve myself. I cried for most of the day.
I ran or hid from the zombies that I met along the way, though I did have to kill a few. The faint scent of my blood made more than a couple seek out my hiding places.
My wound was on my left arm, but it still screamed every time I fired my gun, swung my knife, or did much of anything. I didn’t let the pain deter me from defending myself, though. If I wasn’t turning, I was determined to stay alive.
That night, I settled in a suburban brick house. I washed up the best I could in a small bathroom, cleaned my wound, changed my bandage, and ate a decent-size meal made from canned food that I’d found in the home’s cupboards.
I hadn’t wanted to admit to myself while I tended my arm, but I was pretty sure the wound was infected. I needed antibiotics. I needed my Uncle there to tell me what to do. I needed my mommy to hug me and reassure me that everything was going to be all right.
The house had been void of any medications stronger than Tylenol, which I knew would do nothing for the infection, though I took them anyway. The master bedroom had a large comfortable bed, so after I barricaded myself inside the room, I stripped, wiped myself down again, and crawled under the fluffy comforter.
The next morning, I found a few leftover antibiotics in a medicine cabinet of a neighbor’s house. I didn’t think they’d be enough to knock out my infection, but they’d have to do. I took a double dose, not caring what it might do to me.
Once I did my morning business and had breakfast, I scoured a few more houses on the block for anything useful before taking off in the direction in which I thought the trailer park might be. I knew that the chances my family would be there looking for me were slim. That didn’t matter. It was going to be my starting point in my search for them.
26.
I never located my family—not at the trailer park or anywhere else for that matter. It took me two days to find the park and a full day to wander through the rubble. I discovered no indication that we’d ever been there, let alone that my uncle and cousins had returned to search for me.
The next day, I tried following the route Sam and I had run in when attempting to escape the horde. Honestly, I’d been so scared at that moment, I don’t know in which direction we headed. I never found the first house I’d stumbled upon either.
The trailer park and its surroundings were unfamiliar to me, someone who didn’t live in the area. For all I knew, considering how much damage the park had suffered, I wasn’t even in the same one in which I’d gotten hurt. That place could’ve been an entirely different trailer park. I didn’t think so, but anything was possible.
On the third day, my fever was up, and I had no energy. I had to give up my search. My family could’ve gone anywhere, or they could’ve died.
After leaving the park, I moved farther and farther in the direction I hoped was east. Not once did it occur to me to look for a map in the hopes that it would give me instructions to the nearest military base. I grew up with GPS phone navigation. Paper maps weren’t on my radar.
Weeks later, when I was holed up in a grocery store and saw some on a spinning rack, I decided it was too late to bother going to the base. It was miles from where I was, and I doubted I would make it there on foot. I even doubted my family had found the place. If I’d lived longer, I might have sought out the facility.
Eventually, I don’t know how many days after I’d left the park, Tanner, a teenage boy of about eighteen, found me in the basement of a house in Alabama. Or more accurately, I stumbled upon him. Hell, I was so out of it, I don’t even know how I managed to get inside the house, let alone down to the basement.
We’d had the same idea to hide in the same house at the same time. I say Tanner found me because I’d gone too many days without antibiotics and was half-dead when I’d stumbled into the home and down the stairs to the basement to escape another horde of zombies passing through the area.
Tanner says he almost shot me when I nearly fell face first