AllFreeNovel
Share Us
When I turned around, the room had completely changed and Harlow was gone. No longer was I backstage, but instead I was in the underground stockades back at the quarantine zone.
“No. No, this isn’t right.” I started running my hands along the blank walls, looking for a way out even when I knew there wasn’t one. “No! I’m not supposed to be here!”
The air in the room was disappearing, so I was gasping and hyperventilating. Outside, the zombies were growling and howling, and I clawed at the walls until my fingers bled.
“Lazlo. You have to get up.” That was Remy’s voice, strong and certain right in my ear.
I coughed violently and pushed myself up. I wasn’t in the stockades anymore or backstage, but somewhere I’d never been. My fingers weren’t bleeding, but my body ached all over, particularly my left knee that was still swollen.
I was awake in a strange place.
The floor was cold and concrete, and the walls were windowless and made of cinderblock. There was a solitary bulb hanging on a string above me, and it flickered. In the middle of the floor was a metal drain, and in the far corner of the room were stacks of boxes and other junk.
Based on all that and the musty, damp smell, I gathered that I was in a basement.
When I moved, chains rattled around me. Each of my wrists had a heavy iron manacle on them, with a thick logging chain that was bolted into the wall.
I still had the clothes on my back, but my backpack was missing. My knee throbbed, and my lips were cracked and dry. And now I was being held captive in a dark, mildewy basement.
My time in the underground bunker when the outbreak first began had been claustrophobic, but a luxurious kind of claustrophobia. It was a 3,500 sq. ft. well-stocked bunker underneath a mansion in Beverly Hills, so I hadn’t been denied much of anything except a change of scenery.
The stockades back in the BCQZ, though, those could be comparable to this. I had been caught in the locked medical ward, along with Pvt. Tatum who had aided at getting me inside with Remy. She stayed in the ward, and Tatum and I were put into the military stockades.
Armed soldiers brought us to the basement below the Center Building, and they had thrown me into a small windowless cell, alone. For the first two days, nobody spoke to me or told me anything about what was happening. They didn’t serve me food, and they didn’t even give me any water until sundown on the second day. Then they opened a slot in the door and shoved a metal cup of water inside.
Or at least, I think that’s how long it was. A bright fluorescent light had been permanently on, and there were no windows, no human interactions, nothing to gauge the passage of time.
When I was finally released, I feared it had been months, but it had only been fifteen days. Fifteen days that had dragged on endlessly, a blank overwhelming monotony where nothing mattered.
After I was released and went back to the trailer with Harlow, I tried to pretend that everything was okay for her. She was scared and alone, and I knew she needed me. But I struggled with nightmares and panic attacks. That’s when my insomnia had started, and I’d wake up in the middle of the night to throw up.
This – being chained up in a basement – was better than the stockades. That’s what I told myself, but my palms were sweaty and my heart was racing. I closed my eyes and reminded myself that I wasn’t there anymore, that I had survived that, and I could survive this – whatever this was.
Above me, the ceiling creaked and groaned. That was to be expected in an old house, and the open beams and floorboards of the upper story definitely looked to belong to a very old house. But the scraping and the plodding, the groaning and the scurrying, that was much more alarming and harder to explain.
Sometimes it sounded like a person walking about, other times it was much closer to a horde of zombies. My only comfort was that a zombie would’ve eaten me, not chained me up in their basement.
Then again, there had been the spike strips, so maybe the zombies around here were capable of far more than the others.
When the sounds upstairs had finally fallen silent, the door at the top of the stairs creaked open. The wooden steps were on the far wall, and I sat up straighter, steeling myself for whatever came down.
Heavy boots slowly descended, and the woman from the woods came into view.
“You’re still alive, and you’re not a zombie yet,” she said as she approached me, and she seemed neither happy nor disappointed about that news.
“I told you that I wasn’t bitten,” I reminded her.
“And I told you that I don’t care what you say.”
I lifted up my shackled wrist. “Is that what all this is about?”
“If you’re still human after three days, I’ll set you free.”
“Without food and water, I don’t know that I’ll be alive in three days,” I admitted, and my voice was dry and crackling.
She held up a glass bottle with a flip top lid, and it was filled to the neck with water. Just the sight of it awakened my parched mouth, and I couldn’t mask how badly I wanted it. I would’ve been drooling if I had any saliva to spare.
“Water I can do, but I’m not wasting food or medicine until I’m certain you are uninfected.” She leaned forward and set the bottle down, presumably at the edge of my range, and then she stepped back from me.
