Deadbelt: deep zombie survival in the Conemaugh Valley

Rain on a wooded slope: a woman in a dark jacket stands beside a red hatchback, its front crushed against the trees.

1The wreck

I was in a hotel in Harrisburg for a job interview when news suddenly became real. The last time I got through to Mike, Mike pleaded with me to come home: "Don't stop for anything!" Everyone was driving east, away. My home was west. Past Bedford the turnpike stopped moving, so I got off and took the back roads north over the mountains, in the dark, until the curve.

I came to belted in, with shards of glass in my hair, and a tree where the hood should have been. I drank the water bottle from the console in one go. I then left my laptop on the seat, packed the suitcase with what I thought I could use: a sweater, socks, the snacks. The flowers I'd bought Mike lay brown on the seat.

A grey, rainy morning on a hillside above the road: flowering bushes in the wet grass, a house among the trees, and the town in the haze below.

2The town

The road came out of the trees above a town. There were "people" in the street below, a few, standing in a pose nobody alive stands in. I'd seen it on the news all week. I backed into the trees until I couldn't see them anymore, and I then sat down in the leaves and shook, shivering from the terror of my new reality.

Dusk in a thunderstorm at the treeline: rain slanting across a pale sky, the dark roofs of a row of houses beyond the bushes.

3The edge

I spent the afternoon going round the town inside the treeline. I watched the backs of houses. I felt detached. Most had "them" in the yard, or at a window, or standing in an open door. One didn't: a white house at the end of a lane, its back door hanging off the hinges, nothing moving. I watched it until it became dark. I didn't even think of lighting anything. I lay in the leaves with the bag under my head and listened to them all night.

The house seen from above with its roof cut away, at first light in the rain: the kitchen with its stove and counters, the living room, and a figure in the narrow hall between them.

4The house

At first light I went in through the broken door. The kitchen had been gone through, but not well: whoever had done it left a few cans at the back of a cupboard, an opener and a knife. There was a baseball bat in the children's room. I thought about the children and took it anyway. I had it in my hand when glass broke somewhere at the front of the house and something heavy came through after it. I ran out the way I'd come and didn't stop until I was deep in the trees.

On a village road, one of the dead stands at the verge a few steps away, turned toward the viewer, another behind him and houses on the slope above.

5Dennis

The wreck was the only place in the valley that was safe and felt mine. I went back to it and slept in the back seat with the bat across my knees. In the daytime I went down to the edge of the village to find food. And that is where I killed my first person. He wore a mail carrier's shirt with his name sewn on it, Dennis, and he found me around the corner of a garage. I hit him until he stopped moving, until his head was a bloody mess.

Then I threw up in somebody's flower bed and sat there shaking. Because he'd had a route. And a lunch. And probably someone who was waiting for him the way Mike was waiting for me. After, it became easier. I learned not to look at their hands. Rings were the worst. I stopped reading the names.

The town from above at night: rows of houses and fenced yards, street lamps along the road, porch lights and a few lit windows.

The same town on the same night after the power went out: no street lamps, no porch lights, no lit windows.

6The lights

I was up on the road one night when the valley went out. Every street light and every lit window went at the same time, without a sound. I stood there and felt nothing at all. It was like watching the old world leave, the interviews and the flowers and the bills on the kitchen table, and it went without me. After that there was nothing down there but the dark, and "them" in it.

The next day I found a kitchen with an old phone on the wall, the kind with a cord, and it still had a tone. My hands shook so badly I misdialled twice. Then I listened to it ring in our kitchen, where the radiator knocks and Mike hums when he's scared. It rang eight times, then twenty, and nobody picked up.

I told myself the lines were down, that he was waiting for me. Then I tried my mother's number, and it didn't even ring. I sat on that stranger's floor with the phone in my lap until it got dark. We were going to get married once there was room to breathe, something small. For the first time I let myself think that I might be the only one of us left.

A woman in a white shirt and black trousers stands facing the viewer in a clearing, a black shepherd beside her and the red wreck behind them.

7The dog

The barking had gone on for days before I went looking. It was up a side street, behind a door, and hoarse by then. Its owner was in the next room. I could hear her against the door, scratching, and I knew what I'd have to do to her if I went in. I couldn't do it, not again. So I opened the back door and stood behind it, and a shepherd mix went past me like it was on fire.

I left a can open on the step every evening. On the fourth morning it was lying beside the wreck when I woke. The tag said Bailey. For two weeks it went back to that house every afternoon and sat outside the door, waiting for someone who wasn't coming back. I let it go back, because I understood why it did.

At night it slept in the back seat against my legs. The first night it did, I cried into its fur until I fell asleep. It was the first night since the curve that I wasn't alone.