Page 27 of Reanimated Ruin (Hearts In Horror #1)

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Cat

“WHAT THE FUCK was that?” Dom whispered when we ducked into an aisle for cover.

“I don’t know, but we have enough to last us for weeks. We should just quit while we’re ahead and get the hell out of here,” Jules replied.

I peeked around the corner just in time to see a group of five living and breathing people walk through the doorway of the back storeroom. It was three men and two women. They were dressed in regular clothes with riot gear over top of it, each of them with some kind of melee weapon in hand, but they also each had guns holstered on their hips. The woman at the front of the group scanned her eyes around the room until they fell on me. We made eye contact and I ducked back into the aisle.

“It’s a group of people and one chick totally just saw me,” I cursed, closing my eyes and trying to think quickly of what we should do. Before I could come to a conclusion, she spoke out to us.

“It’s okay, we’re not here to hurt you,” the female called out. “My name is Julia and my friends and I just want to talk. Come on, I’ve already seen you. You look like you’re just kids. You have to be terrified.”

We didn’t immediately trust her promise of peace, looking at each other and trying to silently weigh our options. We could try to run, but then we’d have to abandon all the supplies we’d just gathered, and who knew if we’d have another safe opportunity to get more? They could be heard arguing among themselves in hushed voices, a male and the female who’d identified herself as Julia could be heard above the rest.

“We don’t have all day to wait for them to come out of hiding. Who cares? It’s just a bunch of kids like you said,” the man spat. “We don’t have to bring back everyone we find, especially not a bunch of lazy punks who won’t contribute and only be more mouths to feed.”

“They have a small child with them. We can’t just leave them out here to fend for themselves,” Julia contested. “They need our help. We absolutely should bring back anyone we can as long as they’ve been vetted and proved to not be a risk to the community.”

I shot a look of terror at Dom and Jules, they knew about Rhiannon. FUCK. As I listened to them argue, I found myself leaning towards wanting to trust Julia, but the man she was arguing with was rubbing me in all kinds of wrong ways.

“Okay, well, if the little pukes in here don’t want to come with us, then let’s go see if the one with the little girl in the car does. Since you’re so dead set on saving the damn thing,” the dick-head replied and then I heard retreating footsteps.

Without thinking, I lunged out into the open with my knife drawn. The guys scrambled to follow behind me with their weapons in hand as well.

“The little girl doesn’t go anywhere without me ,” I growled and glared at the group of strangers before me.

My eyes honed in on a tall blond man now glaring back at me and putting a hand on his holster. He looked to be about a decade older than me and his dull brown eyes were flicking back and forth between my face and the knife in my hand. It felt like he was just waiting for me to make a wrong move so he could take us all down. A middle-aged woman with red hair followed my wild gaze. She saw what I was looking at and fixed him with a glare of her own.

“Duncan, calm down and take your hand off your gun. If this is how you’re going to behave, I’ll go to the council and have you barred from my recruit team. We’re supposed to be rescuing people, not picking fights with them. Now, can I please do my job and talk to these kids without you scaring them off first?” She chastised him.

“Fine,” he bit out, then took his hand off his weapon and crossed his arms defiantly.

“Okay, first let me apologize for us starting off on a bad foot,” she turned to us. “As I said before, my name is Julia and I’m the lead of this recruit team. It’s our job to go out and scout for any survivors in the surrounding area. When everything started to go down, any healthy people caught out on the streets were instructed to head to a quarantine zone if they couldn’t safely make it home. The local zone for the surrounding towns, including Efferville, which is the town we’re in currently, is set up at the old Hawthorne Brooke Prep School. It’s run by the local police department and a few town officials, they call themselves the council. They decided yesterday once people showing up slowed down to a trickle that we should send out a team to find people who might not know about it.

“The school hasn’t been open for a few years, so some parts are a little run down, but there’s an immense brick wall that surrounds the entire campus and it’s secure. We have people who patrol it twenty-four hours of the day, so any infected that even gets wind of us are eliminated immediately. Everyone who shows up is assigned a room in one of the dormitories, so you’d still have privacy and a space of your own. Also, we also discovered the facility has back up generators so we will still be able to utilize electricity if and when the power grid fails. We’ve started going on supply runs and they have proved fruitful, so there’s also three hot meals a day guaranteed for the foreseeable future. So now that I’m done with my sales pitch, what do you say?”

“What’s the catch?” I asked suspiciously. “Why would you want more mouths to feed when no one knows how long this is going to last or if it’ll ever even end?”

“Well, a community cannot flourish without enough members to fulfill all the duties required to sustain it,” she answered. “All adults who decide to stay are expected to take on a job to aid in the continued prosperity of the zone. You’re allowed to be included on the decision of where you’d best fit. We are not unreasonable. Be it helping in the cafeteria or watch duty, there are plenty of options to choose from.”

“And if we say no, what then?” I asked. “What happens if we don’t want to come with you?”

“Then you can carry on and be on your way,” she said simply. “We’re not in the business of taking prisoners. If you don’t want to come with us, it’s as simple as that and won’t fight you on it. The decision is entirely yours to make.”

I looked at my two best friends to see what they thought. I couldn’t tell just from a look alone. We were also missing one of our group members, and her opinion was just as important as ours.

“We need to talk as a group with our other friend in the car,” I finally replied to Julia.

“Perfectly understandable,” she said with a nod. “We’ll return to our van and meet you around at your car in a few minutes.”

They turned around and left out the back door they’d came through. We grabbed our grocery carts full of supplies and headed back towards the entrance ourselves, about to go potentially make one of the biggest decisions of our new lives.

Sometimes I wished Sadie wasn’t so agreeable. Trying to get a proper answer out of her was like pulling teeth. She had insisted she was fine with whatever I wanted to do and thought was best for Rhi’s safety, but I wanted to know her true feelings about the situation. I wasn’t one hundred percent sold yet and I valued her input.

That Duncan guy gave me bad vibes. I wished she’d been there for that part. Everyone else on the team had shut up to let Julia lead, but this guy couldn’t help but to open his big mouth and make things tense for no reason. My gut was telling me I could trust Julia, but I was just so scared to get lulled into a false sense of security, only for it to blow up in our faces later.

“I mean, she said the place has a big brick fence that surrounds the entire place. It might be worth at least checking the place out,” Dom reasoned.

“It would be nice to not feel like sitting ducks for a night, maybe actually get a whole eight hours of sleep,” Sadie chimed in and Jules nodded in agreement.

With her finally voicing her opinion on the matter, it was settled. When Julia and her crew circled around front, I told her we’d go with them. She instructed us to follow their vehicle, a big white van that looked like it could hold an additional six people in case survivors were lacking transportation of their own. Once we were all in the car with our new supplies packed away in the back, we began the trek to our potential new home. I hoped it was everything they said it was, I just also hoped it wasn’t too good to be true.

It had been five days since everything went down and from what we saw, there weren’t any signs of things improving. It only took hours for life as we knew it to fall apart and it would most likely take decades, if not centuries, to return to what it once was. It was also possible that it simply never would. Our only hope was finding somewhere new to fit in, to adjust to what life now would look like for us. I wasn’t stupid. I knew most likely we wouldn’t last long out here on our own. Our only chance of survival was to become a part of a community like the one we were being offered a place in.

Only twenty minutes had passed before we were pulling up to a big iron gate set into a tall brick fence that extended as far as we could see. Two people with large guns walked up on the other side. They exchanged a few words with Julia and then motioned for us to be let through. The gate slid open, disappearing into the wall to allow us to pass, then reappearing to close behind. Once we were through, the sprawling campus came into view. It was grandiose and elegant, every building looked straight out of the Victorian era.

As we drove down the main road in, there was a football field to our left and the parking lot to our right. Straight ahead, there were six large ivy-clad stone buildings all set around a sprawling courtyard in the middle. The gardens that surrounded it were a tad bit overgrown with no one to take care of it in the past years, but they were beautiful regardless. In the center of the courtyard was a patio area, it had trellises overhead with out-of-bloom wisterias climbing all throughout. I couldn’t imagine how much it would have cost to be enrolled here while it was still a school, somewhere close to six figures, if I had to guess.

It was the middle of the day. There were tons of people out and about without seemingly a care in the world. You could almost forget for a moment that we were smack dab in the middle of an apocalypse and it gave me hope we’d made the right decision. I saw a group of young children running around together in a corner of the courtyard being watched over by a few adults standing nearby.

My heart sang at the thought that maybe Rhiannon could live a normal life here, having other little kids to grow and play with. We pulled into the parking lot, the car came to a stop in the spot next to Julia’s van and we prepared to get out to get our first look at our new home.

“Whatever happens, we stick together, whether we decide to stay or not we make that decision together. As a team.” Dom turned in his seat so he could address us all.

We all nodded our agreement, then got out of the car. I went around to Rhi’s side, got her out of her car seat, wrapped her up in her blanket, and took her into my arms. She was starting to get heavier and difficult to carry now that she was transitioning from toddler to kid. Dom saw me struggling to keep her up comfortably and offered to take her from me. I reluctantly handed her over, not wanting to be separated from her for a single second but also able to acknowledge he’d have a much easier time with it. She stirred and woke a bit when I handed her over, looking up at him, then over to me and I nodded.

Once he got the seal of approval from me, she simply nuzzled back into her blankets and closed her eyes once again. He looked down at her small form in his arms and a smile lit up his face at her accepting him so easily. He looked over at me, and his beautiful green eyes were twinkling. He looked so proud of himself that she trusted him so effortlessly and absolutely smitten with her. I returned his smile warmly and caressed a hand down his arm. We then began to walk towards where Julia was waiting for us with her crew in the grassy area next to the parking lot.

“Welcome to Hawthorne Brooke Preparatory School,” she greeted us once we were standing before her. “We usually just call it the QZ, though, a whole heck of a lot shorter and there’s not much learning going on here these days. Mostly just surviving. Before we get you settled into a room of your own, we gotta take you through the intake process first. If you’ll follow me, we’ll head over to the main building for that now while I talk at you a little bit more.”

We began walking up the path from the parking lot that led into the school grounds, walking toward the first of the two larger buildings.

“I’ve already introduced myself, but I neglected to do the same with my team,” Julia began. “This here is my husband, Lukas.” She motioned to a tall salt and pepper haired man walking next to her. He had kind brown eyes and looked to be somewhere in his forties, the same as Julia. He gave a small, polite wave, and I thought to myself they make a cute couple.

“And this is Elena,” she motioned to a short, curvy woman with curly black hair. “She was my partner working on shift with me the night everything happened. We’re both paramedics. We’d been working all night when we got called out to respond to a trauma level one human bite. By the time we got there, at least ten more people had been bitten and over half of them had turned already, with the others not far behind. We barely made it out alive. There wasn’t anything we could do, so we left. We realized what was happening, heard the message on the radio and scrambled to pick up our families before coming here.”

“This is my brother, Kaleb,” Elena spoke and the guy standing next to her gave us a casual two-finger salute. He had the same exact hair as her but hadn’t gotten the same short gene as her apparently, as he was about a foot taller than her. He looked to be a few years older than Dom and Jules, somewhere in his mid to late twenties.

“Most of you got the displeasure of meeting Duncan as well earlier,” Julia sneered. “He couldn’t be bothered to wait for the rest of the tour to return to his lap dog duties. He’s a deputy with the local police department that runs this place. They insist on sending one of them out with us anytime we leave the walls like we need to be babysat. Five days we’ve been here, and the power is already going to some of their heads, I swear.”

We entered the main building through two big, colorful stained glass doors. We found ourselves in the lobby and got an eyeful of how the other half had once lived. I had never been in such an opulent space in my life. It felt more akin to a fancy five-star hotel or an art museum. The space had high vaulted ceilings, in the center of the room was a grand staircase leading up to a loft area and the second level of the building. There was a giant ornate crystal chandelier hanging from the ceiling and I found myself once again wondering the cost.

“We’ll have to head to medical first. Everyone who enters the QZ must undergo a full body exam. I apologize in advance. I know it’s invasive, but we can’t allow anyone in whose been bitten. After that we’ll just take down your names, it’s nice to have a list of all the people here if there’s an emergency and we ever need to do a head count. Then we’ll get you guys assigned to your living arrangements. There’s male and female dorms in separate buildings, those hold two people with shared bathrooms and showers per floor. Or if you all want to be together, there’s a third building they usually reserved for upperclassman that are sort of like apartments. There’s four bedrooms per with a shared kitchenette and bathroom per living space. That might be your best option with the little one.”

“Yeah, we all want to stay together. Please.” Dom spoke before any of us could respond, even though I’m sure we were all thinking the same thing.

“Okay, follow me. We’ll get you guys checked out, then everything sorted. You guys don’t have to worry, you’re safe now.” Julia said with a comforting smile then we followed her further into the building.

I was still waiting for the other shoe to drop, for this all to be a trap, but so far it hadn’t come. Because Julia was a paramedic and she could tell we were still wary of strangers, she offered to do our exams herself when we got to medical. It was quick and effortless; I didn’t have even close to the same response as I had at the first quarantine zone. Something about her just felt safe. She had a maternal feel to her. Like anyone she took in from the world outside these walls were now hers to look after and she wouldn’t let anything happen to us.

Once everything at the main building was taken care of, the rest of her team went their separate ways as Julia showed us to our room. Lukas kissed her sweetly on the cheek before departing and you could tell how much he loved her just by the way he looked at her. He looked at her like the sun rose from the horizon and set for her alone. If someone loved her that much, there was no way she could be a bad person.

The building that contained the apartment style rooms was located in the far corner of the campus, with the other dormitories on one side and the two academic buildings on the other. The lobby wasn’t as extravagant as the main building’s, but it still far surpassed any accommodation I’d ever resided in. There were three floors, we climbed the stairs all the way to the last level before stopping in front of room number 310. It was the last room at the end of the hallway on the left side. Julia handed us two keys.

“Well, this is you guys,” she said and turned to me. “My room is on the first floor, number 106. I share it with Lukas, Elena and Kaleb. If you ever need anything, please feel free to come find me. I’m here for whatever you need. Take a few days to settle in, don’t worry about jobs for right now. We’ll figure that out after you get used to how things work around here and decide if you want to stay or not. Mealtimes are at eight AM, noon and 5 PM. I’ll be back by before dinner to show you guys down to the cafeteria, but for now I’ll leave you all to it. See you later.”

She gave my arm a small affectionate squeeze before walking off. I was beginning to feel incredibly grateful she’d found us. Maybe my luck was turning around and I could stop looking over my shoulder for things to go wrong.

I had everyone I loved with me now and we were somewhere seemingly safe. It felt like for the first time in forever I could take in a deep breath without the weight of the world on my shoulders making it near impossible. I put the key in the lock, turned the handle and walked into the space I’d now call home. And not just because of the place itself but the people it contained.