Never Fear Read online

  Man, he swung hard.

  I’ve never seen anything like it—before, or since, despite all that we’ve now been through.

  Stephen hit that sucker so hard that he beheaded the creature, the thing. I watched the head fly … and crash into the water.

  The body trembled in time for a split second.

  And then fell flat to the ground.

  “Kill them, oh, my God, kill them!” Tina cried, tears in the sound of her voice. She was looking desperately around for a weapon.

  Dirk had come running down the steps of the little porch to the house. Like Stephen, he was quick. Someone had been working with a hoe in a little garden to the right of the house; Dirk went for the hoe.

  I managed to join in the fight—a little late. Between Stephen, Dirk—and even Lenore—they killed the things that had come off of the boat.

  The captain and his men.

  “Kill her, now. Kill Lenore,” Tina suddenly shouted. “We have to do it. Damn it—don’t you see? It’s just like legend, just like the movies! People have become zombies. And she’s been bitten! Kill Lenore, kill Lenore! Doctor, you know it’s true—kill Lenore!”

  Madness, I thought. Day was ending; true night was falling.

  And, in truth, we had come to darkness. A stygian darkness.

  Chapter 4

  Lenore

  I am probably extremely lucky that it was my birthday. Zombie apocalypse for your birthday? Hell, yeah, so it seemed.

  And still, I was lucky—so lucky that it had been my birthday.

  Because my friends were there. I have no doubt that had it been just Dirk and Tina, I’d have been executed within sixty seconds.

  But my friends weren’t going to allow it. They would have none of it.

  I felt nothing—nothing but the pain of the bite. I didn’t think that I was going to become a zombie! That thing had gotten a good chunk out of my lower arm near my wrist and I was bleeding profusely. But, I didn’t even feel weak. I wasn’t going to pass out. I was fine.

  Maybe it took time. Maybe I would have to bleed out and die. Maybe I’d get some awful symptoms, bleed from the mouth, do something else horrible, and then become a zombie.

  And maybe that’s what the rest of them were thinking. My own friends were looking at me strangely. Sadly. They couldn’t do it now. They couldn’t. That would be killing me.

  But, the second I started to change…

  “Kill her!” Tina demanded. She’d walked off the porch and stood between us and the boat that had crashed up on shore.

  Between us and the boat and what remained of her sick crew.

  “Now, do it now—before she turns!” Tina demanded.

  “No!” Jeff shouted. “Damn you, I’m a doctor—”

  “And a doctor knows!”

  “A doctor diagnoses by what information is available. I don’t have—”

  “There is no fucking information on zombies!” Tina raged.

  Well, she was right about that.

  “She isn’t sick; she isn’t falling. She isn’t turning. Trust me—if she turns, we’ll take action. She’s our friend; we love her,” Jeff said. “I love her!”

  He loved me.

  In the midst of a damned zombie apocalypse, I was shaking—not because I was turning, not because I was afraid. Not because the entire fucking world had apparently gone to hell. But because Jeff said that he’d loved me!

  I could die happy—which was good, since I was most probably going to die.

  But just as these thoughts raced ridiculously through my mind, I saw that we hadn’t gotten the last of the crew. Seriously, what the hell were so many people doing aboard a ferry that had been bound for an island to pick up less than ten people? Maybe they had just stowed aboard. Whatever, we would probably never know.

  But, he was almost on top of Tina.

  “Tina!”

  I think most of us screamed her name at the same time. She turned, saw the man coming toward her with decaying flesh falling off his face and arms, and screamed.

  I thought it only happened that way in movies. I thought it was impossible for people threatened with death to be so uncoordinated. But, she fell—Tina tied up her own ankles, so it seemed, in her haste to run. And the thing was upon her, biting, gnashing, ripping…

  I don’t even remember moving, but I moved. Fast. I had only my fist. But Jeff was there, and Stephen—Stephen, who could be so silly, who could belt out a show tune at any given moment—Stephen was there, a knight in dusty cotton armor.

  We killed it.

  We killed the thing easily enough.

  Then, as we all argued that there might be more, the unthinkable happened. And in seconds.

  Tina turned!

  We hadn’t really been paying her any attention—not at that point. No one knew if there might be more creatures or not—and we weren’t exactly a functioning democracy—or even a functioning group of friends at that point. So, none of us was watching; none of us saw it.

  What happened was that we heard her. She suddenly had that rattling sound in her lungs. And when we turned… it was instantaneous. Amazing. The change in her eyes. In her color, in her demeanor.

  She was closest to Dirk. Going after him…

  Ali slew the thing that Tina had become with one quick blow from the garden tool he’d snatched up from Stephen’s hands.

  She fell dead.

  “What the hell? I mean, what the bloody hell?” Dirk demanded. “This one!” he proclaimed, pointing at me, “loses a pound of flesh—and nothing. And Tina… poor Tina…”

  “Poor Tina. It’s horribly sad,” Jeff said, “but she was not the nicest person.”

  “Oh, so being nice or not nice makes a difference in whether or not you become a zombie?” Dirk demanded. He spoke sarcastically, but he looked worried. Well, he might have a right to be worried. He hadn’t been particularly nice that day, either.

  “No,” Jeff said quietly.

  “No, that couldn’t be it,” Tracey murmured, looking at Jeff. “But, this can’t be, can it? We have to be in the middle of a horrible nightmare.”

  I wanted to believe that. But it hurt like hell where I’d been bitten.

  “Fact,” Jeff said. “People are turning into zombies. Zombies are terrible creatures that are much like fiction has always depicted them. But as to people becoming zombies…”

  “But… who did this? A terrorist group?” I heard myself ask.

  Tina’s phone had fallen. It was still playing news. Stephen picked it up and said, “Not the Russians, not the Arabs, not… who knows? Look.”

  We all tried to look. The anchor was speaking with foreign correspondents around the world.

  The news showed the zombie insanity in Istanbul. In Munich. In Berlin. In Cairo.

  And then in London, Dublin, Oslo…

  On to Tokyo, Beijing, Auckland…

  And then…

  The screen went blank.

  “The world has fallen,” Jeff said softly. He looked around at all of us. “I don’t know whether to be grateful or not; we may be the only ones alive. We may be just some of a few survivors. We’re on an island. That helped. But as to why Tina turned after being bitten and Lenore did not…”

  “There is a reason!” Tracey whispered.

  “Scientific,” Wu agreed. “And,” he added, looking up at if he saw his own form of Heaven, “Spiritual. Maybe.” He swore.

  Maria sank down on the porch steps. “What do we do now? How do we stay alive? Do we even want to stay alive?” she whispered.

  “Life has always been a gift,” Jeff said. “It should never be squandered. So, what do we do?”

  Dirk began speaking, staring out toward the water, blankly. “There’s food; there’s a garden too. They eventually wanted to have a farmstead out here. Part of the tourist trade. And a petting zoo. Of course, if we use all their crops, they might be pissed, but then again…”

  Jeff looked over at me. He seemed like a little kid for a minute.
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  “They don’t exist anymore, do they?” Slowly Dirk’s voice became more infused with panic. “They don’t exist, and neither do any of our friends, our families, anyone.”

  He started to sob. Jeff hunkered down before him, grabbing him by the shoulders. “Stop it, we don’t know that. Right now, we fight to survive. There are probably other pockets of people. And who knows? Someone we love could be among those people. We are lucky. We have the island. We have isolation. We have to watch. We have to be clever.”

  “And we really have to figure it out,” I said. “Why am I still okay?”

  No one had an answer for me. I saw that both Jeff and Tracey were watching me with calculating frowns.

  A good thing, I told myself.

  “Not to worry, Lenore,” Jeff promised, “someone will be on guard all night.”

  “Against more zombies coming?”

  “Against you,” he said.

  Chapter 5

  Dirk

  I was alone. So alone.

  Tina might not have been the nicest person in the world. In fact, come to think of it, we weren’t really good friends.

  But at least we were a “we.” Now, I was just an “I.”

  They were all friends. Ready to stand pat. And the one—an Arab! I don’t care if the whole world had gone down. His people had done this. They had set off some kind of a horrible virus. If not him… the dark-haired woman. Hell, from what I understood, she was Cuban and Jewish.

  Then there was the black guy. He was…

  Gay.

  Okay, so he was probably guilty of no more than excessive household design and twice-ironed shirts.

  But…

  He was staring at me. Stephen. That was his name. He was staring. I felt my cheeks flush. I couldn’t help but think that he didn’t like me, and I was probably right. Of course, to them—and me, too—whatever, however—it appeared that the world had finally come to an end. It wasn’t exploding; there had been no bang! It was imploding. It had imploded. We might be the last little pocket of humanity.

  Were the animals sickening and dying, too? Was one of those prophecies true? Were we going to leave it all to the kingdom of the cockroaches?

  Lenore—still standing somehow, and not being put down by her friends—must have been thinking along similar lines. She raced to a jagged edge of what remained of the dock and looked down into the water.

  “It seems to be okay,” she cried.

  Yeah, and so do you—you seem to be okay!

  “What do we do?” Maria—the Cuban girl demanded. “What do we do?”

  She sank down on the porch. She started to cry. Lenore walked over and joined her, putting an arm around her shoulders.

  Denial struck me again. This couldn’t have happened. My folks… they had to be dead. They lived in an apartment near Battery Park. My friends. They only looked as if they were a little bit tough. The group of us, all with family that stretched back to the Dutch settlement of New Amsterdam. Yeah, we could be hard on immigrants. Really, we just saw the world as it was.

  The Irish had fucked up New York first. Okay, okay, maybe the English before them. Then, God help us, the messing up continued. My friends… they didn’t hurt anyone. We all just talked.

  Those friends were gone. They had to be.

  But her friends were here. Lenore’s. I started pointing at them, remembering their names from when they had shown up at the island—all for her birthday! There was Jeff, the doctor. Tracey, the nurse. Ali—the damned Arab—was some kind of builder.

  That could be good.

  Not good.

  Useful. Better if his kind had never come. But…

  The others. The Chinese guy. Wu. The girl, Maria. The one we all knew. Lenore. The one who hadn’t changed when she’d been bitten. I had nothing against Lenore. She was blond and beautiful and they all said that she was talented and worked really hard. But…

  Then, of course, the black dude. The gay, black dude. Who didn’t like me. It was like he knew that I’d been living with…

  A darkness of the soul?

  Oh, hell! We just wanted to keep the country… White? God-fearing, but, of course, you had to fear the right god. What was wrong with that? Did any of it matter at all now?

  It was just us. We were supposed to survive here. Or not.

  “Tonight, we have to keep an eye on Lenore—no hard feelings?” Jeff said, talking to her.

  “None,” she assured him.

  “And we need to take turns on guard,” Jeff continued.

  “Okay. You, me, Dirk, Ali?” Stephen asked.

  “We stay awake and watch in twos,” Jeff said. Ali, you and Maria. Tracey, we’d better watch with Lenore—at this time, anyway. Stephen… you and Dirk.”

  Ah, crap, no, anybody but him! I wanted to shout.

  I didn’t. Neither did he.

  And slowly, miserably, with one or more of us breaking down to cry—especially when we buried Tina—the night passed.

  And in the night, I told the others about the wells on the island and that there was a generator; we had to have fuel, of course, but, we might be all right. “They’d” wanted to go clean—the faceless “they” who’d made all decisions for this project—so there were stacks and stacks of solar panels near the garden shed.

  Maybe doing things was good. Really, really good. Especially when we all kept watching.

  But, Lenore didn’t change.

  The night went by.

  Days went by.

  And then weeks.

  And in that time, Ali and Maria became a couple.

  Jeff was obviously taken with Lenore, and Lenore with him. But, it was as if they didn’t want Tracey to feel like a third wheel. They kept it light.

  She worked with them all the time, though, of course, sometimes we all worked together. And we rested together, ate berries and the fish we caught, and learned to love seaweed or kelp or whatever, too.

  We heard nothing from the mainland.

  Nothing from anywhere.

  Ali had designed a way to keep a few phones working through solar energy.

  But there was no news.

  If there were other people out there, they weren’t able to communicate.

  I think it had been almost four weeks—almost a month—since The Day when the first wave came. Maria and Ali were working in the garden. Jeff, Tracey, and Lenore had gone to the church, determined to gather what linens and vestments they could, anything that might be used for sheets and blankets as the weather changed. I was working out front, drawing up gallons of water with Stephen. We’d gotten going with a kind of silent but decent working relationship.

  I looked up.

  There were some dinghies that had been pulled up to the broken wharf. Dinghies with zombies getting out of them! Zombies! They’d learned to man and row small boats. All in their pursuit of human flesh!

  Damned cannibals!

  We had our gardening tools. In the beginning, we’d done well fighting off the bastards with hoes and shovels and picks. We could do so again, but…

  There was were so many of them!

  Too many to be beaten back.

  Ali and Maria were further away. Ali saw Stephen and me. He saw the zombies.

  “Run!” he cried.

  “Run?” Stephen called back to him. “Run! But, where?”

  “Run!” Ali repeated. And then he added, “To the church!”

  And so, we did. Of course, there was a wall and a gate around the church. We could hold them off that way, maybe. That had to be what he intended.

  We made it to the church. Thank God there were no fast zombies. They, were, in fact, almost pitiably slow.

  But, we’d seen them in action.

  There was no pity to be taken at this point.

  “Through the gate through the gate! Shut it, shut it!”

  Jeff, Lenore, and Tracey had heard us. They were there to greet us, to get the gate shut as we raced in. They were armed, too—with all kind of church sta
ffs and staves. They had lit candles, ready to try to burn them if it was necessary.

  “Let’s get into the church—see what they do. A second line of defense,” Ali said.

  He was talking to Jeff. He trusted Jeff.

  To be honest, so did I.

  So, we ran into the church. Once in, we looked out through the stone windows. For a while, we were just tense, taking turns at the little windows. Medieval style, they weren’t much more than arrow slits. But we could see the gate.

  And for the longest time, there was nothing.

  “They’re zombies. Dumb zombies,” Maria said hopefully.

  “Dumb zombies—who came here in boats,” Ali reminded her.

  “Yes, but…” Lenore said.

  “Yes, but what?” Stephen asked her.

  “Tina changed; I didn’t,” she said. “Maybe the church…”

  I couldn’t help it. I think I’d been changing. They were changing me. But, sometimes, I felt bitter. I laughed. “We’ve got a Jew, a Buddhist, and a Muslim among us. And you think a church means something?” I asked.

  Lenore looked at me. “Yeah, I do,” she said softly. Jeff, of course, set his hand on her shoulder.

  The two of them. Hell. They had each other.

  And Nurse Tracey, of course.

  When would it become a threesome, I wondered.

  And it was then that the first zombies came creeping over the stone wall that surrounded the church.

  Chapter 6

  Lenore

  They were coming. Slow and ungainly, stupid! But, they knew to get boats to come to the island—they knew there might still be a food supply here!

  So many of them.

  So very many of them…

  Stephen, Dirk, and Ali seemed good at creating fireball cocktails from church oil, linen, and collection baskets. For a while, the fire helped keep their enemy at bay, but then one got through a back window.

  And then another.

  At first I felt like crying all over again. But, it would do me no good. I couldn’t help but think that it had finally come to this.

  Custer’s Last Stand. Us against the zombies.

  They were coming in, and we were being forced back to the massive hole in the floor that dropped straight into the crypts.