Chapter 11

Amanda was riding shotgun, but she was asleep the whole time. Kate got off the highway and onto residential roads. This is when problems started to arise. We saw one zombie wander out from a back alley, and Kate floored it. She nailed the thing right on the grill, and it splattered. I saw the bottom half of the carcass lie motionless as I sat with my legs dangling off the side of the flatbed. Travis was directly behind me doing the same thing over the opposite side.

"Holy..." he began. I turned to see that one subdivision was completely filled with zombies. They were in the streets and on the lawns. They were filling the homes and sidewalks where children used to play. Now the children were just as violent as the zombies themselves. The walking dead saw us and headed our way, but Kate drove straight for them. She sped as fast as she could right towards them. I held on for dear life as the flatbed began to shake from the increased speed.

Amanda was with me when I woke up the next day. She was asleep on top of me, and I just let her rest. The insanity seemed, just as Travis said, to come and go. It was times like this where I enjoyed her company. If she was resting then I knew she could at least be who I remembered. My dear, quiet Amanda was fading away. I ran my fingers through her hair and listened to the only voice I could still recognize. It was around that time when I noticed something new in the environment. The lights weren't on. The electricity was out.

I gently moved Amanda so that I could stand without disturbing her. I headed out of the theater I was in, and stepped into the dark hallway. I could hear a repetitive banging noise and vulgar swearing. I wasn't exactly sure where it was coming from so I had to follow the sound.

Clang! "Son of a bitch!" Clang! "Mother fucker!" Clang! "God damn it all!" Clang! Clang! Clang! I knew that Travis was the one yelling, and, by the sounds of it, he was in trouble. I started to run towards his voice in a panic. I was expecting the absolute worst. Had the zombies gotten in? How? That doesn't matter now. I had to help him. I continued to run, and along the way I grabbed a broom. It was the closest thing to a weapon that I could get to. Anything was better than nothing.

As I got closer, I could hear a deep rumbling noise. It sounded like a generator of some sort. The lights came back on, but then went back out. When the lights died, so did the generator. I threw the door of the room Travis is in open. He was carrying a large wrench and beating the generator with it. The heavy clangs and loud swears started to arise again. I dropped the broom and Travis noticed my presence.

"This piece of shit!" he yelled while motioning at the large machine in front of him. "This thing is quitting on us. You know what that means? No more lights. No more air conditioning. No more preserving our goddam food!" He lifted the wrench and bashed the machine with it again. I never said a word. He continued. "We are royally fucked, my friend."

I turned and walked away without speaking. As I moved away, I heard Travis continue his abuse upon the now useless hunk of metal. It all stopped when I heard him yell out in anger and lunge the wrench at a wall. It clattered to the floor heavily, and Travis was silent. He was starting to give up hope as well. I might have been the only one able to keep it together. Maybe it was the hope that people were still looking for survivors.

I went out onto the roof and found Kate up there. I watched as she moved closer and closer towards the edge. I wasn't very trusting at that point so I went by her side to make sure that she wasn't going to do anything drastic. She looked at me and smiled.

"Kate...I thought you didn't want to come up here."

"Yah well...the slumber party sucks. Can't see a damn thing in there anyways. I'm not going to die."

I didn't really understand what she meant by the last statement, but I didn't want to go into it. If she was thinking optimistically then at least she hadn't given up hope either. he didn't say anymore. She simply turned and walked back inside to leave me standing alone. That seemed to be the way conversations would end.

I paced back and forth across the roof. It was still early, but the sky was beginning to turn dark. On the horizon was a city shrouded in darkness. It was only a matter of time for the night to spread and overtake the day. It seemed that maybe the light would never return.

"How sad..." said a voice from behind me. I turned to see Amanda near the door. She didn't have the crazed look in her eye. It was really Amanda. She came up to me and put her arms around me tightly. "Isn't it odd? You come up here sometimes and you're alone. Sure there's a million bodies out here too, but you're still lonely."

"I don't feel very alone right now." I told her.

There was a pause before she spoke. "I'm sorry. I don't know what's happening to me. I keep waking up in a place where I never fell asleep, and I always wake up feeling completely awful."

I tried to smile. "We all wake up feeling like that."

"No...It's different. I wake up with an empty feeling. Like I'm missing something. I wake up feeling like I've done something wrong." Tears began to roll down her cheeks. Suddenly she pushed me away from her. She had that odd look in her eyes again. "Don't!" she yelled at me. She stormed quickly away from me and left me confused. I learned that the insanity was triggered randomly.

I wished that she wasn't a lost cause. I constantly worried if she would still be this way once we escaped. I worried if it would get any worse. Too many thoughts flowed through my mind, but there was one more thing that began to bother me. It had started to rain.