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I climbed up on a bale of hay so I could see over the wall, and inside, I saw a girl standing in the center of the stall, and another person was curled up in the corner.
Her clothing was little more than rags – an old tee shirt patched with flannel and tattered pants. She was tiny and frail, with eyes much too big for her face, and her stringy hair hung down in two braids. All of that made it really difficult to guess her age. She could’ve been a tall eight-year-old or a malnourished sixteen-year-old.
Her left arm was missing from below the elbow. It was her eyes that were the most alarming thing about her appearance, though. Not how big they looked in her emaciated face, but the drawn blankness of them. They held no sense of fear or curiosity or hunger or urgency. They were as lifeless as a dolls, and if I didn’t see her breathing, I would’ve thought she somehow managed to die standing up.
“Doors are locked,” she said flatly.
“I know,” I said. “Do you know where the key is? Or any tools?”
“Waylon has the keys. He won’t be happy you’re out.” Her every word came out monotone and blank, much like her eyes.
“Are there any spare keys? If I found them, I could let you out, too,” I said, hoping that dangling escape in front of her might elicit some reaction.
Instead, she just repeated, “Doors are locked.”
“What about your friend? That person over there?” I asked.
“Buddy doesn’t know anything.”
“Are you sure?” I pressed. “Maybe you can ask him?”
The person in the corner finally stirred, uncurling himself so that I could see that he was a teenage boy, maybe a bit older than me. He didn’t look anything like the girl, but his eyes were hauntingly similar. Blank and lifeless.
But that was not what I noticed first. His mouth had been sewn shut. Thick dark string was woven through the swollen flesh, with red puffy wounds healed around it. A hole had been cut into his sallow cheek, all healed and puckered, and it gave a window to broken teeth and scabbed gums. The hole was a horrific solution to how he ate and drank without use of his mouth.
“Buddy doesn’t know anything,” the girl repeated, and he shook his head.
Since they clearly wouldn’t or couldn’t help me, I gave up and said, “I’ll come back for you and set you free,” and I hoped that would end up being true.
“The zombies are the only ones who are truly free,” the girl intoned hauntingly.
There was no response to that, so I jumped off the hay bail and hurried around the stable, looking for tools or weapons or anything that would help me get Kimber out of the stall.
I hadn’t been rummaging for long, when I heard the sound of voices coming from the western entrance of the stable. I couldn’t get back in the stall on my own without a key, and it wouldn’t be good for me to get caught out in the corridor, so I sprinted the other direction.
I ran out of the eastern door of the stable, but as soon as I felt the chilly afternoon sun on my face, I stopped short and froze.
I’d known we were on some kind of farm or ranch, and I had expected to encounter overgrown fields and farm animals.
But I had nearly run face first into a wire mesh fence, and on the other side of it were zombies. More zombies than I had ever seen all together. Hundreds and hundreds of them, in various states of decay, hobbling around behind the fence.
But the fences weren’t just keeping them out. They were directing the infected into the closed-up nearby barns. The zombies were being kept in captivity, the same as me and Kimber.
“What is this godforsaken place?” I asked breathlessly.
“It’s our home, so why don’t you show some fucking respect,” a man growled behind me.
I whirled around to see Elmyra’s son Bly standing with another man. The other man was older, with gray salting his moustache and thinning hair, and he glared down at me.
“I’m sorry,” I mumbled.
I tried to run away and dart around him, but Bly grabbed my long hair and yanked me backward. I fell onto the ground, and he still had my hair in his hand when he kicked me twice in the ribs with steel toe boots. The third time, he kicked me so hard I threw up, and the time after that, even the other man tried stopping Bly.
“Bly, don’t kill her!” he shouted through my haze.
“She’s lucky I don’t take her to meet the King,” Bly snarled, and then everything blacked out for a while.
The next thing I remembered after that was Kimber screaming.
