The Watcher in the Woods (Zombie Apocalypse)

Chapter One

Dad always used to joke about the end of the world.

"With the amount of canned beans Mom hoards in the pantry, we'd never starve in the apocalypse," he would say.

What little humor I had left in me trickled away as I stood between our tent and the limp corpse of my father. His head was marred by a dark red hole the size of a pea. My own head felt light, yet my body became unbearably heavy as I dragged my feet towards his lifeless form. My knees met the ground with a thud that was both painful and sharp. It didn't matter. Nothing mattered anymore because my father was dead. A voiceless scream waited in my chest. Daddy's dead.

In the days following his suicide, the hardest part of accepting my circumstances was trying to understand that there was nothing I could do to change them. I could only pretend we were sitting around our piano back home, learning old songs together or watching the stars from our patio. When those memories became unbearable, I'd reminisce about nights where we'd catch Mom prancing around the kitchen to songs from her college days.

There was such a thing as the second hardest part of accepting Dad's death. I was no stranger to losing a loved one. Grandma had lost her life at 73, and grandpa followed shortly after. Next was Mom. But it was different this time. Something told me Dad's death would never quite sit right in my heart. It was knowing that he had chosen to leave me here with nothing more than his backpack and an empty gun. The knick-knacks he left behind meant close to nothing. Because now, as the sun set for the fifth time since he'd died, dried food did little to console me the way his words did.

I sat against a log and forced down some food. All the times I swore to my friends that I'd never eat meat again, swallowed away. The sun had already disappeared over the horizon, but in the low light I could still make out the string trap of empty cans set up around the tent. It would rattle if anything tried to pass the threshold but even so, I knew that without him to look over me, it would be another restless night. 

A chill swept through the trees and I reached into the backpack for a blanket. It was a thin one we had managed to salvage from an abandoned camp a few weeks ago. I wrapped it around my shoulders, hoping the last of Dad's scent would settle my aching chest. It didn't take long for a warm wetness to crawl down my cheeks. When my body was finally worn from all the crying, I drifted off - falling in and out of hazy dreams that featured images of my old life, mixed with the terrifying ones I now lived.

This particular night I dreamt of the chilly winter's evening I sat with Dad in our dining room, back when dining rooms existed. Dad stared at his phone and I stared at the cold dinner on my plate. Mom was usually home by six. I peered at the clock on the kitchen wall. Seven forty-five.

"Put on the news bub," he whipped me with a tea towel. "And stop moping. She'll be home soon. You know her. Probably working overtime."

That would explain her absence, but not the unanswered calls and texts. I wordlessly took the remote and watched the yellow Simpson's characters fade to black as the channel switched. We weren't supposed to watch TV during family meals, but whenever Mom wasn't there to nag us about it, Dad and I didn't see a need for the rule.

The news reporter had the usual serious expression etched on her face as she read from her prompt. "In breaking news, the fourth incidence of what can only be described as cannibalistic aggression has emerged. With 19 injured and three dead after four separate attacks across the country today, police and health professionals are desperately working together to uncover the root of this strange..."

After a while, her words blended together like the pile of vegetables I had been scraping back and forth on my plate. As Dad left a third voicemail to Mom's phone, my attention stayed glued to the screen to distract myself from the ever-growing sense of doom that bubbled just below my calm surface. Eventually the reporter moved onto a humorous piece about the local dog show, but her lips were still caught in a straight line - her eyebrows wedged together in a permanent frown - the way they do when you're wondering how to make it out of California by sunrise.