The Awakened by Sara Elizabeth Santana Page B

city.
    I was stuck inside my house with no phone, and no one seemed to know what was going on. I was scared, terrified, and felt completely unprepared. I was stuck with the last person I ever wanted to be stuck with, but I couldn’t get rid of him.

 
     
     
     
    IT HAD BEEN THREE DAYS since the zombies had appeared. We had no phone service, no internet, and I hadn’t heard from my dad. The television didn’t even work. Ash and I had scrounged up an old radio of my dad’s and some batteries and tuned it to find a local radio station, but there was nothing there at all. We were living in complete silence and complete darkness. There was no power. We ate as much as we could from the freezer, old pints of ice cream, frozen vegetables over the stove, to keep it from going bad.
    We didn’t talk much. Ash showed signs of wanting to talk had no desire to rehash anything that had happened. Instead, we just tiptoed around each other, trying to read books and magazines by the light peeking in through the curtains or by the flashlights at night.
    I spent a lot of time in the shower. It was the one place in the house where Ash couldn’t go. It was the only thing in the entire apartment that worked. I turned the knob, and water came out. I stood under the steaming hot water, trying so hard not to think about anything, except getting clean.
    Every time we looked out the window, it looked like more and more zombies had shown up; more of them were wandering the streets. They were always covered in blood, and sometimes they even had limbs hanging from their mouths, like a snack they were saving for later. It was revolting, especially when a fight would break out over the smallest bit of flesh. They all had raspy breaths. It sounded exactly like every worse nightmare I’d ever had. Sometimes, in the middle of the night (or maybe the day, it was so hard to keep track), you could hear them as they made their way down the street.
    The radio silence, the calm that seemed to have taken over the city, was unnerving. I was used to the sounds of the subway, cars honking at the kids playing soccer in the streets.
    That’s why, when the sound of gunfire reached my ear, I completely toppled out of my bed and landed on the hardwood floor with a crash. I lifted my head, and heard it again, the gunfire, and the sound of cars screeching by.
    “Ash,” I called loudly and uncertainly. “Ash!”
    I heard a loud crash downstairs that reverberated through the house; I turned on my heel and raced downstairs.
    “Zoey!”
    “Dad!” I cried, flying into his arms. He was an absolute wreck; his shirt was torn, and his jeans were dirty and covered in blood. There was a hefty gash across his forehead, and a nasty bruise forming right on his jawline. He caught me up, just like when I was a little girl. “Dad, you’re hurt.”
    “I’m fine,” he said, hastily wiping at the gash on his forehead, smearing blood into his hair. “It’s not bad. Where’s Ash?”
    “Here, I’m right here,” Ash said, coming out of the kitchen still armed with the fireplace poker. “What’s going on?”
    I could hear sirens in the distance, mixed in with the occasional scream. The sounds of fallen footsteps as people ran past our brownstone reached my ears, and I could hear the rattling breaths of the zombies, just as Madison’s had been. I wanted to cover my ears, to shut it all out. Instead, I grabbed the gun and retrieved the holster from the case that I had left open in the coat closet.
    “They’re all over the city,” my dad explained, as he reloaded his own gun and slid it into its holster. He passed me a box of ammunition without meeting my eyes. I knew we were both thinking that this was never the purpose of my gun lessons. “We weren’t sure what they were until people started reporting their dead family members alive, and that’s when you told me about Madison.” He took another gun out of the waistband of his jeans, loaded it and held it out to