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

“Stick together and stay quiet. We’ll go down and straight to the parking lot,” I reminded her as I looked through the peephole.

The area around our door looked clear, but that didn’t mean our neighbor wasn’t still lurking.

I opened the door as silently as possible and peeked out.

He had made his way to the other end of the hall, so I gestured for Amy to follow me, and we crept toward the stairwell.

I didn’t know what we would find on the first floor, so I prepared for the worst. Compared to earlier, everything seemed quiet.

It was so quiet that I was sure my heart thundering in my chest could be heard by anyone or anything within hearing distance.

When we reached the midway landing, I paused and looked at Amy to make sure that she was ready.

She closed her eyes, and then, after a few short seconds, she opened them and nodded.

We went down the rest of the steps and entered the lounge.

There was blood everywhere, but that wasn’t the most concerning thing.

It was the groups of zombies feeding on the bodies strewn about.

The silver lining to our situation was that the zombies were so focused on their feast that they hadn’t noticed us yet.

I grabbed Amy’s hand and pulled her behind me toward the front door, which hung off its hinges.

Just before we reached the door, Amy slipped in a pool of blood and screeched.

The yum yum sounds of happy, eating zombies ceased, and for several seconds, the world was void of all sound as they all turned toward us.

I had what felt like an out-of-body experience looking at all my dormmates I had grown to know over the past year.

My eyes caught on Ernie, and tears threatened to fall.

I had assumed his fate, but witnessing it in person was devastating.

I met his dead eyes, and it almost looked like he tilted his head in recognition before snarling, blood and flesh dripping from his open mouth.

“Run!” I yelled, pulling Amy to her feet and dragging her through the door behind me.

It was better outside only because we weren’t in an enclosed space.

I quickly pulled her into the clump of shrubbery across from our building.

Hidden from view, I held my breath to see if anyone saw us.

When we weren’t attacked, I focused on Amy, shaking like a leaf in hurricane winds.

I put my hands on her shoulders and made exaggerated breathing movements to get her to match my breaths and calm down.

Amy opened her mouth as her eyes widened from whatever she saw over my shoulder.

Quickly, I covered her mouth to keep her from speaking and slowly turned my head to peek over my shoulder.

Ernie was back. It seemed he was just as persistent in death as in life.

He stood over us for a while as he sniffed the air and turned this way and that, erratically, like he knew we were there but couldn’t figure out how he couldn’t see us.

When another group of living, breathing students poured from the dormitory, Ernie’s attention was pulled from us, and I used the distraction to pull Amy out of the bushes and away from the screaming people and the growling horde of zombies surrounding them.

The parking lot where my car was parked was halfway across campus.

Most of the time, it’s faster to go through campus, but there was also a walking path through the woods that we could take to get there.

Given the circumstances, the path less traveled seemed the wisest choice.

Trusting Amy to follow me, I let go of her hand and led the way.

I spotted a zombie in our path and pulled back the bat as I approached it.

When I was close enough, I swung the bat as hard as I could, and I wanted to cheer when I heard the satisfying crack of my bat connecting with its head.

The zombie went down; I wasn’t sure whether I killed him or not.

The start of the walking path was about fifteen feet away when I heard Amy scream.

Again. I turned to see her fall to the ground.

I was pretty sure she tripped on air. I was also confident that she lied when she told me she was a surfer.

There was no way someone this clumsy had the balance required to surf.

My annoyance with her quickly evaporated when I saw the zombie approaching her.

“Amy!” I yelled, pointing.

She managed to roll to her back and lifted the bat just as the zombie reached her and attacked.

Using the bat, she managed to hold the zombie at arm’s length, but I knew she couldn’t hold him off forever.

I ran back to her and swung the bat as hard as possible at the zombie’s face.

Fluids... exploded... on impact in the most disgusting way possible.

I guess the face is juicier than the side of the head. Good to know.

Amy scrambled to her feet, and we booked it for the trees as more zombies moved toward us, attracted to the noise we made during the scuffle.

I forced myself to slow down when we reached the path.

It was uneven, with roots sticking out of the ground, and the last thing we needed was for Amy to fall again.

As I had hoped, the walking path was deserted, and we uneventfully made it to the other side.

My SUV was parked a few spots into the second row.

I could see it from the edge of the trees where we crouched to observe the parking lot and figure out what we were dealing with.

The parking lot seemed quiet, eerily so.

I held my finger to my lips to remind Amy to stay silent and then jerked my head toward my car.

It was a straight line to the car, so I was surprised when I tossed my bag into the backseat and climbed into the driver’s seat, not to see Amy in the passenger seat.

Where the fuck did she go? With a sigh, I reached for the handle to find her, but she came running through the cars in the row ahead of me and got in the car.

“Where the hell did you go, and why are you wearing a hoodie now?” I asked as I started the car and peeled out of my parking spot.

“Jeremy was sitting in his car, so I went to check on him,” Amy explained, tears streaming down her face. Jeremy was Amy’s ex, and while they had recently broken up, Amy always expected them to get back together. I didn’t need to ask if he was ok.

“And the hoodie?”

“It was in his backseat.” And she wanted something to remember him by.

I reached over and squeezed her hand. “I’m sorry.”

I navigated through the parking lot and onto the main road leading away from the college. The road ran straight through town, and we looked around in shock as we drove. The once charming college town was in flames.

“How could this have happened so quickly?” Amy asked.

“I don’t know,” I replied. My thoughts turned to my hometown, which was significantly smaller than this one. That may turn out to be a good thing. “It can’t be like this everywhere, right?” I asked more to myself than Amy.

The further from town we got, the easier it was to pretend that the horrors we faced weren’t real.

There were fewer abandoned cars. Fewer zombies were stumbling around—fewer people in general.

About an hour after sunset, I stopped at a small gas station for the night.

As anxious as I was to get home, I didn’t want to tackle the unknown dangers ahead in the dark, plus we needed gas and something to eat.

After filling the gas tank, I parked by the door, and we went into the small convenience store.

We took every hot dog they had cooking on the rollers, a variety of snacks, and all the water the store had available. Once we had a ridiculous number of items on the counter, I looked around, having just realized that we hadn’t seen the cashier once since we entered the store.

“Hello?” I called out. Nobody responded. “What do we do?” I asked Amy.

She shrugged. “Do you have any cash to leave?”

“No. Do you?”

Amy shook her head.

“Ok. I’m making a list of everything we’re taking and leaving my number so they can call me to pay with my credit card over the phone,” I decided.

“Add Advil to the list,” Amy said as she tossed a handful of pills from the newly opened bottle into her mouth and chugged some water.

“Did you take enough?” I asked incredulously.

“My head feels like someone is trying to split it open with an axe,” Amy replied.

I finished my list, and we loaded everything into the SUV. When we parked behind the building, out of sight from the road, we finally had a moment to breathe and gorge ourselves on hot dogs and junk food.

When we were almost too full to move, Amy said, “I’ll sleep in the cargo area. You can take the backseat.”

“Are you sure?” I asked.

“Definitely. You’re the one who drove today, so you should get more comfortable sleeping arrangements,” Amy replied.

“Thanks,” I said. I waited for Amy to climb into the back, then moved to the backseat and lay down.

“What if everyone we know and love is gone?” Amy whispered a while later.

“They aren’t,” I assured her more confidently than I felt. “We’ll get to my house, and then my parents will know what to do. They’ll know how to get you home to yours.” She didn’t say anything else, and soon, I drifted off to sleep.

We were on the cusp of a new dawn when I woke up later.

I lay silent and unmoving to let my body wake up while I mentally prepared myself for another day in whatever fucked up world we lived in now.

When I first heard the telltale sound of a zombie, I thought it was coming from outside the SUV, but as I listened closer, I realized it wasn’t.

It was coming from the other side of the back seat. It was coming from Amy.

I assumed that since she hadn’t attacked me yet, that meant she didn’t realize I was there.

It was the only advantage I was going to get, so I couldn’t fuck this up.

The first thing I needed to do was get the fuck out of the car without getting bitten.

Slowly, I unlocked the door manually and winced when the slight click echoed in the car, and Amy snarled.

As her shadowy figure loomed over me from the back, I briefly fumbled with the door handle before I got the door open and bolted from the car.

As I hoped, Amy tumbled out after me. As I ran around the back of my car, a motion-sensing light turned on, illuminating the area around us.

Amy must have gotten hot in the middle of the night and removed her hoodie because when she stepped into the light, I immediately noticed the bite mark on her forearm.

That was why she took the hoodie—not as a memento but to hide the fact that she had been bitten.

“Dammit, Amy!” I yelled as I jumped in the driver’s seat, started the SUV, and sped away from her.

I made it about a mile down the road before turning around and going back.

I couldn’t leave Amy like that. I passed her a short distance from the gas station and slowed down to make sure she had turned around to follow me before I sped up again.

I left the engine running, ran into the store, and grabbed the crowbar I had spotted the night before.

I hefted it in my hand to feel its weight as I went back outside.

I met Amy halfway to the road, and before I could chicken out, I swung the crowbar at her head.

The end of the weapon went through her ear and into her brain.

I had expected, like the movies, for her to die instantly, but she didn’t.

However, it knocked her off balance and caused her to fall to the ground.

Quickly, I pounced on her, ripped the crowbar out, spun it around, and stabbed it into her head again.

The force of the impact was jarring and sent shocks up my arms, but Amy stopped moving. I wiped away tears I hadn’t realized were falling as I pulled out the crowbar again and stood. As I stared down at her body, I remembered the last thing she said to me.

What if everyone I know and love were gone?