Chapter 2

We were passing the border into Nebraska when I started to doze. I attempted to sit up straight and keep my eyes wide open, but the effort was almost painful. Noticing this, Julie volunteered to do the driving for awhile. I gratefully accepted, pulling off on the side of the interstate and switching with her, my eyes shifting cautiously around the empty farmland. No zombies were here, but there was hardly ever any people before, either. Once I was on the passenger's side, I reclined the seat and was asleep as soon as I shut my eyes.

A few hours later, I woke up to the sound of Julie crunching on a nutrition bar. She offered me one out of the plastic bag, but I turned it down. I had eaten the pop tart I got at the gas station while driving earlier. I pulled my seat forward and looked behind me at Gabe. He was fast asleep, hunched against the window. It was night now, the dark making me uneasy. It felt like there was more danger when there wasn't sunlight to reveal it to our weak eyes.

"I've just kept on driving," Julie said suddenly. "I have no idea where we're going."

"Manitoba," I said. Julie glanced at me confusedly. "In Canada. My dad lives there." I had decided right after we picked up Gabe that I needed to see my father. I needed to know if he was alive. My parents had divorced when I was twelve, and I used to visit my dad every summer up until three years ago. I haven't seen him since. He's all the family I have left now.

"Sounds.. good." Julie flexed her fingers and said hopefully, "Maybe the zombies haven't spread to Canada."

"Maybe," I agreed. It was wishful thinking, though. As we've seen on the news, the virus spreads like wildfire, eating up everyone in its path. Literally.

We were halfway through Nebraska when I realized the urgent need to pee. I told Julie and she pulled off the interstate on the next exit into a small town. Then slammed on the brakes. The headlights of my SUV fell on a group of zombies shuffling around the entrance to the town mindlessly. I swallowed the urge to gag when I saw them... and what they were eating. There were five in total. Well, four and a half. Three of them feasted on a rather large man, tearing at his flesh with their blood-stained teeth.

"Go," I whispered to Julie. "Gogogogo."

She was in shock, staring at the zombies with a death grip on the steering wheel. I nudged her shoulder and she finally put it in reverse and flung the car up the exit. I looked back and saw the zombies' empty eyes look up and watch us until we were out of sight. You could say my need to pee wasn't that urgent.

Gabe woke up when we reached South Dakota. I heard him rummage around in the plastic bag for food. "Pass me a Mountain Dew?" I asked. He obliged and I thanked him.

"So what's the plan?" He asked, mouth full of peanut butter crackers.

I turned around to face him and smiled when I saw him. He faintly resembled a chipmunk. "Manitoba, Canada."

"Why Manitoba?"

"It's where my dad lives," I replied. Gabe nodded in understanding. I had to wonder what happened to his family, but I for sure wasn't going to ask.

I opened the Mountain Dew and almost chugged it. "The drive to Morris, Manitoba is about a 14 hours," I told them. "We're only half over."

"Ugh." Julie sighed next to me. "Are we going to be able to stop somewhere and sleep?"

I thought about it. I still needed to pee, so we do need to stop, but would it be safe to stop and sleep? Maybe we could barricade ourselves in a motel, but do we really want to take that chance? "I don't know." I looked at Gabe. "What do you say?"

"Only if we can find a nice deserted place with heavy doors and big locks," he replied. He ran his fingers through his shiny brown locks, and I suddenly wished I could touch his hair. I shook the feeling quickly.

"I guess we'll just keep a lookout." I sat back in my seat, resigned.

My two companions agreed and we kept driving. To keep ourselves from thinking too much, we ended up comprising a plan. We decided we would sleep the night in a motel around Fargo if we found one, get up around nine in the morning and get going around ten. Gabe offered to drive the rest of the way, since he hasn't done any driving yet. It's nine at night right now, and if we leave from a motel near Fargo at ten, we'll make it to Morris around lunchtime. It felt a lot better to have a plan in all this mess.

We made it to a town ten miles from Fargo, North Dakota at midnight. We drove off the interstate, and we must have been blessed because no zombies walked around the tiny motel or the gas station next to it. Thankfully, the two structures were far from the town. We pulled into the parking lot carefully and slowly. Julie turned off the car, and we sat there for a bit, reluctant to leave the safety of the SUV. Finally, we got out and walked to the main office.

The process of getting rooms was easy enough. The office wasn't locked so we walked right in. The place was very small, just enough room for an over-sized desk and a dying ficus. The keys to the rooms hung on hooks behind the desks. It felt wrong, but I grabbed two keys to rooms right next to each other. I kept one and handed the other to Gabe. Silently, we carried our exhausted selves up a flight of stairs outside the main office and found our rooms.

"Goodnight," I said to Gabe as he started into his room.

His eyes lit up even in the dark as he smiled. "Night, Ashly."

I calmed the fluttering of my heart, blaming it on the paranoia of a zombie walking in on us while we sleep, and followed Julie inside our room.

In the morning, instead of waking up to the alarm clock I set, I woke up to scratching on our door. I looked over to the bed beside mine and Julie was still asleep, bundled in the scratchy motel sheets. I hesitantly rose from the bed, and walked to the door. I could hear my heart beat in my ears, and I hoped with all my might that it would be Gabe outside. Of course, more wishful thinking. When I glanced out of the peephole, I saw a gray-skinned man. A stringy mop of bloody hair sat on his head, and more blood dripped out of his mouth. A hand missing three fingers scratched on the door. Could he smell us? Were there more zombies? Closing my eyes I tried to shut out the awful image of the zombie, but failed as it settled behind my eyelids.

Backing away from the door, I whispered, "Julie. Wake up." I walked over and shook her, my eyes never leaving the door.

"Wha-"

"Shhhh!" I pointed at the door. "Zombie."

Her hazel eyes widened with fear. "What're we gonna do?" She jumped out of bed. We were both still clothed in the same clothes as yesterday, not having packed any luggage at all. A change of clothes was definitely the last thing on my mind as I left home.

"I don't know, wait?" I tried not to sound as scared as I actually was.

Julie started crying a little. She's always been pretty emotional. "I knew this was a bad idea." She plopped on the bed, dropping her head in her hands to hide her tears. I sat beside her, my hand resting on her shoulder.

I definitely don't want to come this far just to be eaten in the end. I haven't gotten over my losses, but I know now that dying won't make it all better. I felt like crying myself.

Two gunshots, one right after the other, rang outside our room. I jumped up and ran to look outside the window by the door. The dead man was laying face down outside the door, a hole in his head and in his shoulder, and Gabe stood outside his room with his gun, shirtless. I blushed in spite of myself.

As I walked outside and faced Gabe, I became very aware of how unattractive I probably look right now. I shrugged it off and stepped over the zombie, which was hard to do mentally. To his surprise, I gave Gabe a quick hug. Two days ago, I would have never hugged a stranger, but this whole end of the world thing brings people to together, I guess. I was pretty distraught. But not as distraught as Julie, who followed me out of the room and sidled past the dead zombie, her eyes red.

"We need to go," Gabe told us, tucking his gun in his back pocket. "I don't really know, but the shots might attract more zombies." He ran inside and returned with his shirt halfway on.

Julie and I hurried down the stairs without argument. The farther away we are from here, the better. I was a little disappointed though, because I wanted to restock some food and drinks from the gas station, but after talking to Julie and Gabe, they agreed to stop somewhere once we were a good distance away. It's not like the zombies could chase us in the car, but it felt better to be far, far away from them.

"We need weapons," I informed the two. I hadn't thought about actually fighting off the zombies before, just running away. I realized, though, that if I wanted to survive, I need something to defend myself. "We have your gun," I said to Gabe, "but that'll run out of bullets. Julie and I don't have any weapons at all either."

"I once read on the Internet that axes and crowbars are good zombie-killing weapons," Julie suggested. At our blank stares she said, "I do read."

I laughed. She does look like a ditz with her blond hair and bubbly-ness, but she's really actually kinda smart. People always assume I'm the smart one of our little duo, because I'm passive and I don't have blond hair. My hair is a dark, dark brown. "I'm sorry, but I'm short on both at the moment."

"We could check out the next gas station for sharp things while stocking up on food," Gabe said from driver's seat. Julie was in the back and I sat beside Gabe. "And I'll bet there will be a gun behind the counter in case of robbery or something."

I nodded. "Sounds like a plan." The clock on the dashboard read 8:34, so I assumed we'd reach Morris an hour earlier including the stop.

"How big is Morris, you think?" Gabe inquired.

"It's small. Small enough to where everybody knows everybody," I told him. "Like back home." I looked at Julie, and I regretted saying it because I could see she became sad. I was homesick, too.

"That's good. Going into a big city would be suicide," he said. I realized he probably thought all this through many times. He was the perfect guy to have in a survival group. It gave me hope.

In the hour we drove away from the motel, nobody spoke again. It gave me time to think, and I didn't like it. The world was ending, I hadn't seen but a few living people since we left Kansas, and I was starting to have the dreadful feeling that it was just us, tromping down the interstate, the only living people in the world. But I knew that was ridiculous. If I could survive, if Julie could, others could, too. I wondered where they were. Were they hiding? Were they driving to find loved ones like me? There were no zombies on the interstate, I would have thought it would be a popular place for the living. But the number of cars we've encountered has dwindled until the interstate was completely abandoned.

Finally we stopped at a gas station that wasn't part of any town, and wasn't near any civilization, which made me happy. Gabe filled up the gas while me and Julie walked into the store in the gas station. We grabbed a few plastic bags sitting on top of the counter and filled them with food and drinks. I found some t-shirts and grabbed three, just in case. Believe it not, Julie found a small hand ax hanging on one of the shelves. She ripped the plastic covering off and held it up like she was about to swing.

"I definitely cannot imagine you using that," I laughed. She grinned. I began to walk to the back of the counter to check for a gun, and stopped dead in my tracks. A dead body lay on the floor, and as I backed away it rose, back facing me. "Oh, God," I whispered.

Hissing, the woman zombie turned to face me, spattering blood at my feet. She was quicker than other ones I've seen, and I found this out as she grabbed my arms with her decaying hand. I screamed.

I saw Julie run for the back door out of the corner of my eye. "Ashly, run!"

I kept screaming and kicked with all my might, slamming the zombie in the stomach. It flew back against the counter and I took off out the back behind Julie. I slammed the door shut, but had enough time to see Gabe run in and shoot the zombie between the eyes. Shaking, I sat down against the concrete wall and cried, the gun shot ringing in my ears.