Snippet #2492152

Stevie Darden


Stevie parked her car in the garage and looked at the clock. 2 a.m. It had been a long day, but it was worth spending her evening with Dean's sister and the baby. Her recovery was hard and her husband had to be out of town for work. Stevie didn't mind at all when Heather called her at 5, asking through frustrated tears if she could come over and spend time with the baby while she took a much-needed nap. Heather was sweet, and Stevie knew that if she was making the call that it must have been a very long day alone with a four-week old. Dean was the closest family she had nearby, and this particular January happened to be fairly cold. Besides, Stevie liked Heather.

The elevator stopped her off on the eleventh floor. Right before Christmas she'd moved out of the Fremont apartment she had shared with three other roommates to move in with Dean. She unlocked the door, stuck her keys and coat on a peg, and glanced out the window past the kitchen, overlooking Pike's Market and the waterfront. Bainbridge Island glittered faintly in the distance, and the rest of the city reflected sparkily on the calm water. She pulled off her yellow boots and placed them by the door.

She bent down to greet Dean's very old dog, a slow, graying Cocker Spaniel named Jeremy. She'd always thought it was a funny name to give a dog--but that's what made it so amusing. She scratched behind his ears and talked to him quietly and gave him a little peck on the top of his old skull. He let out a small "oof" noise and contentedly trailed his way back to his pillow near a heating vent. Stevie smiled at the dog and said good night, hoping that he still had many good nights left in his old bones.

She opened the door to the bedroom. Dean was stretched out on their bed, reading the latest issue of Spin. A lamp lit the room in a soft yellow glow. He looked up and smiled. "Hey," he said, "how's it going? You didn't text."

She walked over and gave him a kiss. "I didn't want to wake you up," she said, "and I was listening to Spiritualized in the car. Kind of wanted a few minutes."

Dean laughed quietly and put the magazine down on his nightstand. "I wanted to wait up for you. Thanks for going over there," he said. "That was nice of you to do on a Tuesday night."

She smiled and unbuttoned her shirt, tossing it into the laundry bin. "It was fun. Your nephew is a sweet little guy. I think Heather's having a tough time, though. Hopefully Jeff gets back soon."

Dean pulled the blanket aside. "Yeah," he said, trailing off, unsure of what to add. "Heather says you've got a knack for it."

Stevie kicked off her leggings and sat on the edge of the bed, pulling her hair out of its rubber band and smiling. "Babies are pretty cool," she said, nodding and grinning enthusiastically. "They're just these tiny little creatures that are completely helpless. It's a little hilarious. But they just need a good cuddle and life is good, you know, Uncle Dean?"

Dean laughed again. "No, I don't know, I can't even figure out how to handle the little guy," he said. "I can't say I like anything about them," he added jokingly.

Stevie unclipped her bra and flung it like a slingshot at Dean. "The only thing you like about babies is making them," she said mockingly, grinning. "You're terrified of babies. You even sound like a baby."

He let out a louder laugh and threw the bra back. "You read my mind," he declared back, "secret's out. You got me." He looked at her for a moment and smiled. "Well, I'm sure I can get over that someday."

Stevie smiled back and tried to hold back the butterflies in her stomach. "If you want me to keep sticking around, you're going to have to," she said, leaning forward and pulling off her glasses. "I'm a bad Catholic, but I'm not that bad."

There was a long pause as the two stared at each other intently. But before they knew it, the fire alarm started to trill screamingly through the apartment and the halls. Jeremy let out a long howl from the living room. They laughed; someone must have been cooking, and doing a poor job of it, at a really bad hour. Stevie pulled on a sweater and a pair of Carhartts and Dean got up, already dressed. She pulled out a pair of slippers while Dean situated Jeremy on a leash, and made their way down to the street level with the old canine in tow.

# # #

Stevie jolted awake suddenly from her dream, hours after she fell asleep. In her head that fire alarm was blaring, screaming, so loud until she'd managed to wake herself up. IV drips could mess with your mind sometimes. As could sedatives.

But she couldn't hear the labored breathing off to her side anymore at all. Instead, all she could hear was the ticking clock, every stroke echoing loudly within the temporary metal walls, punctuated irregularly by a couple of clumsy footsteps. She wondered if the sedative had worn off or if it was still working.

Then a noise. A faint sputter from beneath the curtain in front of her. Stevie darted her eyes diagonally. Down below was another woman, the nurse who had helped with her IV, crawling on her elbows. She looked up at Stevie, half of her face red and sliced and her forehead turned to ribboned flesh. She opened her mouth to say something, but suddenly disappeared, yanked away by some unknown force.

A scream emerged from the other side of the curtain, a lot like the noise that had echoed in Stevie's head moments ago. A wet chewing noise silenced the outburst, continuing past it. A few more footsteps. A few more slow-gnashing sounds joining in.

Stevie tilted her head to peer through the slit in the curtain. Her eyes snapped wide open once she recognized the gray-skinned, dead-eyed appearance of the infected. She leaned back slowly. Two of them, gnawing on the body of the nurse. Two more dead bodies laid still near the entrance: the doctor who had greeted her coldly upon her arrival and had given her the sedative, and a man in a blue shirt.

The silence was louder than the sounds of the feeding.

She sat very still, hoping that maybe she could stay like that for a long time before maybe someone opened the door and distracted them. She kept every muscle in her body tense and still. She breathed low and quiet, fighting the urge to suck in oxygen. The smell in the mobile was horrible.

A thump on the door. A muffled voice called out. The walkers stopped chewing and focused toward the noise, and started to make their way over.

Stevie huddled herself backwards, trying hard to remain quiet as she did so. Unfortunately, she didn't consider her weak, IV'ed left hand, losing her grip and falling loudly onto the floor, first falling back-first on the metal drawer posted next to her, the contents spilling out on the floor. The needle ripped out of her skin and she let out a scream as the metal bar with the two half-filled IV bags and the raised cot came crashing down over her.

The curtains were torn asunder as the two walkers sought the source of the scream. It didn't take long for them to look down and see the frightened, half-naked young woman in glasses scooting her legs fast to get away from them.

She managed to pull the lightweight bed frame over her head, preventing one walker from getting a hold of her long hair and pulling her upwards. It bellowed low as it flopped its arms around, trying to remove the object and get to its food. The other walker crowded directly behind.

Her heart pounded and her throat felt tight as her white-knuckled hands hung on to the frame and shoved it hard against the undead assailant. She felt hot tears coming to her eyes, suddenly feeling extraordinarily angry about everything that had happened. Her adrenaline surged, spurred on by both survival instincts and overdue distraught rage. None of this was fair, for anyone. She briefly imagined Dean on the beach, and how similar his eyes were to this poor soul's. How Dean might have done this very same thing had he been here in the mobile with that injury. How maybe she should have just shot him, since she couldn't help him in the first place. How angry she felt that she'd had a dream about something that happened four months ago after seeing that awful, dead face on the beach.

The walkers' hands and teeth were starting to hack apart the thin foam padding and the metal frame.

It was then that she remembered what had killed Dean. Thomas had shot him in the head.

She reached out a hand to grab a hold of the base of the IV stand, and wrested her arm to knock it forward, ambitiously hoping to skewer at least one walker's head. It didn't work out as she'd planned; it slipped from her grip and swatted forward. It forced the second walker back a few feet, but the first one stayed and lowered its face toward hers. Panicked, she threw her right hand to the floor and snatched up a pair of plastic-sealed first aid scissors that had fallen from the drawer, and shoved them between its eyes. As she quickly pulled the scissors out, a spout of thick red blood splattered down over her medical gown. She watched in horror as the figure collapsed on her stomach, grateful to have subdued it but still shocked, all the same.

The other slowly started back toward her. She pushed the heavy body off of her and stood up, continuing to grip the scissors, aiming them toward the head as it lurched forward robotically. Another one down. She stepped over the toppled bedframe.

The lights flickered heavily as more shouts were heard at the door and the handle jiggled uselessly, a few pounds intermittently whomping through, shaking the light metal walls. The door was locked, probably with the intent of keeping the dangers of outside away from the patients inside. How wrong they were in this case.

The walker sprawled out near the door sat up as though jolted by electricity, locking eyes with Stevie. The lights continued to flicker, then dimmed significantly. Before her eyes could adjust, the walker was on its feet. Stevie instinctively stepped backwards and slipped on the pool of blood that had trickled toward her feet, landing on her back in the red puddle. The air whooshed out of her lungs, causing her to cough and gasp. The walker was on top of her in seconds, face roaring near hers, hands trying to get a hold of her struggling head for long enough to bite into it.

Several seconds' worth of struggle. The light flickering threateningly. Stevie had been weak a few hours before but now fought for her life, managing to overpower the larger walker. She straddled its chest and dug her knees against its shoulders in an attempt to immobilize its arms.

She looked down at its face as it struggled beneath her: it looked a lot like how Dean had on the beach, with shaggy hair and a missing eye. The resemblance was almost uncanny—same gray complexion, same milky hollowed dark eyes. Same shoulder bite, plastering all over the inside of her left leg. Most of his left arm was even missing, and he wore a blue shirt.

The sedatives. The fever. The heat. Whatever it was, it clicked in Stevie's brain.

The single second of hard-hitting clarity. Life was different now. Everything had changed. And it was as simple as that.

She drove the scissors from one side into the walker's temple, sending a spray of blood upwards. She flung out an elbow to shield her eyes and mouth.

She rested for several seconds, then climbed off of the walker and sat up on the floor. She rested herself up by her palms, knees halfway up in front of her, staring toward the quiet door. No thoughts moved across her mind. Just silence. She blinked her eyes slowly, barely moving. Her shallow breathing was quieter than the sound of the slowly-ticking clock.

The door then burst open with a forceful booted kick, and a familiar figure stood in the doorway and shot the dead doctor at the door square in the head without hesitation. The echoing bang didn't even bother Stevie as she connected her knees quickly, her big brown eyes on the verge of tears. Her glasses were smudged with blood, arms wobbling behind her, her right hand still clutching the bloody scissors. She looked ahead and struggled to see the person around the flashlight shining directly in her face.