There were a lot of other things he needed to think about, however, with his thought process finally working at full capacity. All of this was a lot to take in and he vaguely wondered if he was going through some sort of shock. That would make sense, wouldn’t it? His mind shouldn’t have been able to accept everything that had happened to him so far. At the moment, though, he thought he could deal with it. It might catch up with him later psychologically, but for now he felt calm.
Fifty years. He couldn’t bring himself to accept such a big number yet. That was longer than he had been alive (or at least believed himself alive, since apparently his true age would be somewhere around eighty-three). Whatever had happened, everything he remembered was now the distant past to many people. He didn’t think that any of the people he had met so far in this freakish nightmare version of his world were even old enough to remember the time Edward came from.
So the question was, how did he get from then to now? For some reason, the first thing that popped into his head were all those stupid science fiction movies Julia had loved so much, stories where someone got trapped in the wrong time. That idea was absolutely ridiculous, and it had the added side effect of bringing Julia to the forefront of his mind. He didn’t want to think about her, not yet. He didn’t want to consider the idea that she might be fifty years older and frail, or maybe even dead…
No, best not to think about her. Not yet. Not until he was more ready to deal with this. He had to keep his mind back on figuring out what had happened in the first place.
Time travel, then, was too idiotic to consider, but he supposed it was no less insane than the idea of dead people walking. He had seen that with his own eyes, and not just today. That had begun on that Fourth of July fifty years ago now. And if he had any hope of understanding how he had made it to this point, then he needed to better reconstruct that day in his memory.
There had been no sign that anything was out of the ordinary for most of the day, and the first time he had begun to wonder if something was wrong was when he had heard a car crash somewhere a few blocks away from his house. No, wait, maybe that wasn’t the first he had heard. He vaguely remembered something he’d heard when he’d gone for supplies at Walmart, something the cashier had said. The girl, a bored-looking twenty-something, had mentioned some sort of scare she’d been hearing about down in the direction of Chicago, some virus or something. She’d said it was being mentioned all over the place on Twitter and she’d asked him if he wanted to by one of those surgical-type masks. A lot of people had been coming in to get them, she had said. Edward had nodded politely and left, holding his tongue against all the obscenities he’d wanted to say to her. It had just been more hysteria created by morons who would believe anything the media told them, just like all the people that had been afraid of the West Nile Virus and the Swine Flu.
Except he supposed that hadn’t been the case. The outbreak that had begun in Chicago hadn’t been false hysteria after all.
When he had actually been doing the cookout, though, it had been the car crash that had made him uneasy. Dana was playing on her swing set and didn’t even hear the noise over her own delighted giggles on the swing. The sound hadn’t been too terribly loud, so Edward tried to pass it off as a fender bender and go on cooking his brats. Julia came out and asked him if he had heard it, and he said he had, but she wasn’t too worried. She was more curious than anything. Edward wouldn’t really call her a gossip, but she always wanted to know the latest news about their neighbors, and he supposed she wanted to know if it had been anyone she knew.
Edward was too preoccupied with making sure the brats were perfect, that sweet spot where they were cooked all the way through but not darker than a deep brown on any side, to notice that Julia went around to the side of the house to the front. He did hear, however, when she screamed.
The first thing he did when he heard the scream, even before he had checked for Julia, was to look for Dana. She was still on the swing set, sitting at the top of the slide, but her little six-year old eyes were wide as she looked in the direction of the side of the house. Edward turned to look at the same place and completely forgot about the brats.
Julia was running toward him holding her left wrist. He could see the blood dripping from it and splashing on the grass as she ran, but he didn’t yet fully register that she was hurt. As he abandoned the grill and went to stop her in her panicked flight he became aware that hers wasn’t the only scream in the air. Somewhere else in the neighborhood there were other screams, men and women both, as well as other noises he couldn’t quite identify yet. The noises were loud and yet deep, like the wind blowing through empty canyons, sounds that had no right being heard in a quiet neighborhood in Heartland America.
“Get Dana inside! Get her inside!” Julia screamed, and even though Edward had no idea what was happening his instincts told him to do exactly what she said. He ran to the swing set and grabbed his daughter as Julia ran in the house through the back door, and as he was pulling the startled and now crying girl off the slide he looked in the direction Julia had come from. He saw the first of the monsters coming around the side of the house, a creature that looked human except for its uneven walk and the unidentifiable guts hanging from the wide gash in its stomach. His hand went up to cover Dana’s eyes, but he couldn’t look away. He couldn’t help but continue staring even as the thing shambled closer, and only when he saw a second one coming up behind the first did he realize he should be running for the safety of the house.
As soon as he was through the door Julia slammed it behind him, although she wasn’t able to manage much force. She looked pale, and the blood was still flowing from her arm at an alarming rate. He set Dana down in the living room and ran to get something to bandage Julia’s arm, although all he’d been able to find on such short notice had been a couple of t-shirts. They at least slowed down the blood, and while Julia slouched exhausted in Edward’s arms he had stared out the living room window to see all the insane carnage going on outside. He had no idea what those things were or what they wanted, but they were ravenous, attacking anything that moved and ripping it apart with their teeth.
Edward didn’t know how long he sat there watching, but when he came to his senses again he realized Dana was no longer in the room with them. He called her name, but she didn’t answer. When he tried to move Julia out of the way so he could go look for Dana, however, she didn’t budge. She was just dead weight in his arms. That scared him at first until he noticed her shivering. He put a hand to her head, ready to test for a fever or something, and that was when she bit him.
He remembered yelling and pulling away from her as she first fell to the floor and then began crawling after him. He moved away, suddenly very frightened of the vacant and unfocused look in her eyes, but all memories after that faded to a hazy intense blur in his mind. All he could remember was the smell of burning brats coming in through the window, and with that he had begun to feel very, very hungry.