Page 21 of Dyana (Love in the Apocalypse #3)

The living room was empty, and so was my parents’ room.

I walked past the kitchen and down the hall to the kids’ bedroom.

The door was locked from the outside, and I wasn’t sure if that was good or bad.

I opened the door, and the sliver of hope I had stupidly clung to dissipated, and my heart fell out of my chest. “No!” A ragged sob tore from my chest at the sight of the little bodies huddled together on the bed.

The decomposing, unzombified bodies. They had died before the outbreak.

This was my fault. I left them here to die while I was living it up at college.

I could have done more. I should have done more. Why didn’t I do more?

Because I didn’t think anyone would listen. They hadn’t before. Still, I should have fucking tried.

“I’m so sorry, Bryce,” Jack said.

His voice broke me out of my stupor, and in a rage, I barreled past him and Evan back toward the living room.

If they weren’t already dead, I’d kill my parents with my own bare hands.

I reached the living room and overturned the coffee table, sending forgotten drinks, glass, and whatever the fuck else was on there, smashing into the wall.

Everything became foggy as I took my anger and guilt out on the house.

I stood in the kitchen when the front door opened, and my parents ran inside.

“What the fuck are you doing!?” my father bellowed. “How dare you come into my house and destroy it!”

Their presence momentarily stunned me. As I watched them, I noticed they couldn’t keep their balance, so they kept swaying and knocking into each other.

“Of course, you pieces of shit are still alive. You’ve probably got so much vodka in your veins that the zombies don’t even want you.

Hell, you’re practically zombies already.

You’re brain-dead and stumbling around. You fit right in. ”

“I’ll fucking teach you to talk to me like that, you ungrateful bastard,” my father roared as he rushed toward me.

Not this time. This time, I wouldn’t take his beating.

I grabbed a dirty butcher knife from the sink and met him halfway, plunging the knife into his chest with a roar.

My momentum sent us falling to the dirty floor, and I stabbed him again and again as Billy, Eric, and Janna’s little faces kept popping up in my mind.

When my arm got tired, I planted the knife through his eye socket and left it there.

My mother was screaming at the top of her lungs the entire time. Slowly, I looked up at her. “Shut the fuck up.” Her mouth slammed shut immediately as I rose from my father’s corpse. “Where are the kids, Patricia?” I asked, unwilling to ever refer to her as Mom again.

“What do you mean, where are they?” she asked. “They’re in their room being punished.”

“And how fucking long have you been punishing them, you dumb fucking cunt?” I screamed. I grabbed her by her hair, dragged her kicking and screaming down the hallway, and threw her through the bedroom door.

“Should we stop him?” I heard Evan whisper behind me.

“Stay out of it,” I warned without turning around.

When Patricia tried to stand, she grabbed the bed for support and finally noticed the bodies. She screamed again in shock and then started crying. “My babies! What did you do to my babies!?”

“Your babies!? Don’t you dare fucking call them that! You’re what happened to them. You locked them in this room and then fucking forgot about them! They starved to death because of you!”

“No, no. I didn’t mean to. I don’t know what happened. It was your father!”

Sick of her fucking excuses, I shoved her to the ground and wrapped my hands around her throat. “You aren’t going to hurt anyone else ever again. You were our mother! It was your job to protect us, but there wasn’t anyone here to protect us from you.”

Patricia clawed at my hands as her face first turned red, then purple, and her eyes got red and bulged out of her head. I didn’t stop squeezing until she stopped breathing, and even then, it was Jack who had to convince me to let go.

“Come on, brother, she’s gone. You did it. She’s gone.” Finally, with Evan’s help, they managed to get me to my feet.

“I want to burn it down,” I said as they guided me down the hall.

“Then we will,” Evan replied. He turned on all the burners and the oven as we passed by the kitchen, then swiped a dirty rag and a half-filled liquor bottle.

We went outside and had to fight off more zombies, which Patricia’s screams had attracted.

Once that was done, Evan lit the Molotov cocktail and handed it to Jack.

“QB?”

Jack took it and beamed it through the door from our position behind a neighbor’s truck. The trailer exploded before the bottle could even break against the wall. I stood and watched the fire erase the evidence of the horrors that happened in that trailer.

If only they could erase my guilt or the scars on my soul.

Present

I understood where Dyana was coming from.

I wasn’t the same person I was before the apocalypse, either.

That man died the moment I stepped foot inside that bedroom and saw my siblings’ bodies.

Growing up, I had plenty of opportunities to kill my parents.

I probably wouldn’t have gotten in trouble for it, but I hadn’t.

Looking back, I wish I had. Barely a day into the apocalypse, I was a murderer.

They deserved it, but I still killed them in cold blood.

It took a long time and my best friends’ support to move past that day.

Everyone has done something in the apocalypse that they aren’t proud of.

“It’s starting to get dark,” Jack said, interrupting my heavy thoughts. “Shouldn’t Dyana be home by now?”

“Radio down to Cora and ask if she is staying there tonight or if she needs one of us to walk her back,” I suggested.

“Tower to base. Tower to base,” Evan said into the radio with a gleeful look. I shook my head. Nerd.

“What’s up?” one of the guys responded.

“We were just calling to see if Dyana was going to spend the night there or if we should come down to walk her home.”

“What are you talking about?” Cora asked. “Dyana isn’t here. We haven’t seen her all day.”

Jack and I ran to the radio as if being closer would help us listen better or change what we heard.

“She left here this morning upset. We assumed she went down to your place,” Evan replied, exchanging worried looks with us.

Where the fuck was Dyana?