“Yes, you are.” She jumped at me, poking me again. It really did hurt.
I tried to move away but my leg connected with the corner of the coffee table, tripping me. I reached out and grabbed Lucy, pulling her down with me. She squealed.
We landed on the carpet, me on my back, Lucy on top of me.
She was breathing hard and laughing. “I win.”
I looked into her blue eyes. “Do you really think I’m brave?”
She narrowed her eyes for a second, as if trying to decide if I was being serious or joking with her. When she decided I was being serious, she said, “Of course you’re brave, Alex. You saved my life. I don’t know anyone braver than you.”
A moment passed between us and we moved our heads closer to kiss.
But before our lips touched, the smoke detector in the kitchen began wailing its high-pitched alarm.
“The breakfast!” I said.
We scrambled to our feet and Lucy ran to the stove, taking the smoking frying pan off the gas ring. I grabbed a hand towel and waved it beneath the smoke detector mounted in the ceiling near the door to the aft deck. “How bad is it?” I shouted above the alarm.
“Not too bad,” Lucy said, flipping the hash browns with a spatula. “They’ll just be well done.”
I opened the door to let some fresh air inside and continued clearing the smoke with the towel until the alarm stopped. I went back to the stove and continued cooking breakfast while Lucy poured the coffee.
We stood in silence, me flipping the hash browns, which were very dark brown on one side, and pouring the canned tomatoes into a pan while Lucy watched me, taking a sip of her coffee every now and then.
After a few minutes, she said, “Alex, I’m scared.”
“So am I.” I turned off the gas and used the spatula to place the hash browns and sausages onto two plates on the counter. As I added the tomatoes, I looked at Lucy and said, “Sometimes I think that going back to Apocalypse Island is a stupid idea. We could just sail out to sea and live on the boat like we did before.”
“Before you heard your brother on the radio,” she said. “I know there’s no way you can sail off into the sunset until you find him. You didn’t abandon me and you wouldn’t abandon him either. Or your parents.”
She was right. If we sailed away now, I would always wonder what had become of Joe, and our parents. And I would always wonder if I could have saved them.
“Hey,” I said to Lucy. “We might find your family while we’re delivering the antivirus.”
She shook her head and tears pooled in her eyes. “You heard your brother’s voice. You have a glimmer of hope. I’ve already accepted that my family is dead. We know what it’s like on the mainland. I just hope that they are actually dead and not… you know.” The tears spilled onto her cheeks.
I put my arms around her and held her tight. She cried against my chest for a few moments and then pushed away, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand. “Come on, let’s eat breakfast before it goes cold.”
We took our plates to the dining table and ate quietly. Heavy drops of rain began to spatter against the windows and onto the deck.
As we finished eating, I heard a shout from outside. Stepping out into the rain, I crossed the foredeck to see Sam on the deck of the Escape. He was wearing his Savatage tour T-shirt and jeans and was grinning while he held out his hands to catch raindrops. “Hey, Alex, it’s a great day to go into zombie territory,” he shouted.
I nodded but didn’t share his enthusiasm. There were no great days anymore; all the great days were behind us.
All I could see ahead of us were days of pain and sorrow.
2
An hour later, we were heading back to Apocalypse Island, sailing through the pounding rain and rough waves. I sat in the pilot’s chair on the bridge, peering through the water-streaked windows at the gray sea and sky as I followed the Escape across the waves toward the island.
Every now and then, I glanced at the coastline hidden in mist and drizzle. Somewhere on the mainland, Jax was loose and probably leaving a path of destruction in her wake. For all I knew, Vess, the other Type 1, had escaped the confines of Alpha Two and was also roaming the land.
I had blamed myself for Jax’s escape from the boat but Lucy had made me see that, if not for being injected with the pure virus at Apocalypse Island, Jax would never have turned into the monster she was now. It was Hart’s fault, not mine, that Jax was on the mainland wreaking havoc.
And now I was going to be working for the organization that ran Apocalypse Island. It didn’t sit well with me.
All my life, I had distrusted and rebelled against authority of any kind. In my shitty job, before the apocalypse, I had hated the bosses simply because they controlled me. I had sold my soul for a crap wage and they knew I needed the job to pay the rent. So they could give me the mind-numbing tasks and I would accept them without a complaint. As far as they were concerned, they had me for life.
The zombie outbreak had changed all that. Most of the people I had worked with were probably now dead, or shuffling around with blue skin and yellow eyes searching for prey.
And I was alive.
But now I was going to work for yet another company and follow their orders. And I wasn’t even getting paid.
And as far as shitty tasks went, traveling through a zombie-infested country to deliver an antivirus beat anything I had ever been asked to do in my old job.
I had to remember that I was doing this for myself, so I could find my family, and help the other survivors. I might be working for the scientists that had caused this mess, but I wasn’t part of their organization. Once the job was done, I was taking Lucy and my family, if they were still alive, and sailing out of here. I wouldn’t look back.
In the distance, beyond the Escape, the dark shape of the island appeared against the backdrop of gray sky.
My stomach roiled. It was all very well deciding to sail away after the job was done, but surviving that long wasn’t going to be easy.
APOCALYPSE ISLAND LOOMED over us as we moored our boats alongside the others at the dock. The rain was still coming down in full force, hissing off the island’s rocky cliffs and the concrete blocks that formed the dock.
We were all dressed in waterproof jackets from the storeroom. They were dark blue with the ‘Sail To Your Destiny’ motto embroidered in small avocado-green letters over the right breast. They were fine for keeping the rain out but the waterproof fabric was noisy whenever we moved. The jackets were equipped with hoods but we didn’t use them; we needed to be alert and aware of our surroundings. Apocalypse Island was just as infested with zombies as the mainland.
The four of us waited on the end of the dock. It was too dangerous to walk up the asphalt path that cut through the cliffs to the woods beyond. Sam and I had learned that lesson the last time we’d come here.
“How will they know we’ve arrived, man?” Sam asked.
“They’ll see us on the cameras,” Tanya said, indicating a camera bolted into the cliff face. The red light on top of the cylindrical steel body was glowing.
We stood close enough to the boats that if zombies or hybrids came down that path, we should be able to cast off before they reached us.
The rain bounced off the dock, the boats, and our waterproof jackets. Except for the splash of raindrops hitting the sea, there was no other sound.
“Maybe there’s nobody here,” Lucy said softly.
I knew what she was thinking. Maybe Site Alpha One had been overrun by zombies and hybrids. It was possible. The compound was protected by a fence and they had Hart’s security team to protect them from the nasties, but his team wasn’t that big and if an infected person got inside the perimeter fence, all hell could break loose.