Four weeks later

***

The stabbing pain in the base of her neck shook Layla awake, more effectively than a bucket of ice water. She raised her head off of the tabletop and gingerly massaged the sore spot.

Stupid cramps.

This was the ninth straight day she’d woken up in the same fashion, but she’d learned to live with it. Especially since it seemed as though soft pillows were the least of their problems.

Layla rolled off of the table, barely able to keep her crudely bandaged legs under her when they touched the hardwood. And only when she was sure she wouldn’t topple headfirst into the fireplace, did Layla take a glance around Mr. Harrison’s dining room.

It was much like the way it was when she fell asleep five hours previous. It was exactly the same. Even her housemates were in the same places that she’d left them.

Griffin was asleep on the floor beneath the table, his legs at an awkward angle, and his hips resting across the table’s base.

Then there was that guy who lived in the house: Terrence.

Apparently, he used to be Mr. Harrison’s gardener and had taken shelter there around the same time as them. He also spoke pretty fluent Spanish, she couldn’t help but notice.

Terrence was sleeping across the seat cushions of three chairs they’d lined up against the wall. His feet and hair hung over opposite ends of the makeshift bench.

That guy, Eric, was asleep sitting up against the fridge, with his finger still looped around the trigger of his father’s pistol. The way his head lolled to one side made Layla grimace.

At least someone is going to wake up with a worse cramp than I did.

And the fourth guy (nobody was sure of his name), the rough-looking teen with creepy blue eyes, sat quietly in the chair by the window. He flipped his pocket knife open, and then snapped it closed, exactly as he had been when she laid down to rest.

“Don’t you ever sleep?” Layla demanded. She swung her arms in a backward swimming motion in an attempt to stretch out her neck.

The unknown guest glanced at her over his shoulder, then looked back out the window without a word. And she was about to lay into him about ignoring her when he lightly shook his head.

“That’s not healthy,” Layla pointed out, then inwardly smacked herself up the head. Why was she even trying?

It was like having a conversation with a brick. A brick that made constant, annoying, clicking sounds.

“These things are stupid,” he grumbled, snapping his knife closed and setting it down on the windowsill. “But I'm no smarter than they are when I'm asleep,”

Then the stranger stood up and looked down at Layla. The look on his face was somber, almost careless, but his eyes told a different story. With a wave of his hand, he gestured her towards the window.

“You want me to look?” Layla asked. She took his lack of response as a yes, and scooted around his outstretched arm and down into his seat.

One glance through the glass, and she saw what they’d all been avoiding since locking themselves into this hellhole, to begin with.

Towering figures. Rotting flesh hanging off of their stumbling limbs. Hundreds of them. Maybe even thousands, scouring the area. Digging through dirt with long, yellowing, nails. Anything that moved was devoured on sight. Oftentimes torn apart, being fought over by dozens of the living dead.

A majority of the group had been locked in Mr. Harrison’s since the apocalypse began, four weeks prior. And only recently had they stopped hearing the constant, heart-wrenching screams of agony, as more and more of the few survivors left were found.

They were locked up, and surrounded. One false step, or too heavy of a noise, and thousands of these creatures from hell would be busting down the walls.

He was right: they weren’t very smart. But they didn’t need to be. The beasts only knew two things. Hunt and eat. Even if it destroyed them. Just hunt, and eat.

Layla sighed and glanced down. Her eyes locked onto her companion’s pocket knife. Upon looking it over, she noticed a name engraved into the edge, with curly hearts on either side.

“Adam,” She read aloud. Then she looked back at the stranger. “Is that who you are?”

Adam stared at her. “I don’t know who I am anymore,” he answered quietly. “But that is what they call me,”

That didn’t make sense, but whatever. Layla stepped away from the window, and let him have his seat back.

“Adam,” Terrence echoed groggily, addressing them from his resting place across the room. “That’s a cool name,” He looked completely out of it. Half delirious from the lack of sleep, and half from the broken leg he sported with a homemade splint.

Adam merely nodded his thanks, without so much as sparing him a glance.

Griffin groaned and rolled out from under the table. He slowly climbed onto his hands and knees, then hissed in pain and grabbed his back. “Oh God, a h-hernia,” he moaned.

“You’re fine, you just slept on the table base,” Adam grumbled, much preferring it when they were all still asleep.

“You can have my spot,” Terrence offered. He carefully lowered himself onto the ground to make room for Griffin.

“That sounds gr-great actually-“

“No,” Layla flicked her friend’s nose. “You’re not making the broken guy sleep on the ground because you have a cramp,”

“It’s fine,” Terrence assured her. Then he laughed. “I don’t think I can get back up anyway,”

Layla helped him into a standing position with a roll of her eyes. “We really wouldn’t have to worry about all this, if that bitch hadn’t locked herself in the only room with a comfortable bed,"

“There’s ice in the freezer if you want some!” Terrence told Griffin, in a completely unsuccessful attempt to change the subject away from their guest upstairs.

“Well you weren’t exactly pleasant to her when that guy pulled her out of the garden,” Eric yawned and nodded his head at Adam. Then his neck seized up. “Damn! That one is going to sting for a while,”

“Speaking of which,” Terrence balanced himself on the table and politely excused himself from the obvious argument that was about to commence. “I’m going to check what’s growing,”

“If all we have to worry about is cramps and lack of mattresses, that makes us the lucky ones,” Adam announced over his shoulder. He adjusted his position to better keep an eye on Terrence in the garden.

“We should have left her out there,” Layla scoffed, as Terrence limped out the back door.

She recalled how ungrateful Whynn was when Adam brought her inside. The way she shoved him off was like he was kidnapping her or something. Even though he’d just risked his life to save her worthless one.

Her screams almost got them all killed.

“She was scared,” Eric shrugged.

“Is that right?” Layla hissed, raising her eyebrows. “Well, then we ought to give her a free pass right? For being the only one scared out of her mind right now,”

“She’s being sarcastic,” Griffin informed them.

“I can see that you moron,” Eric snapped. He’d lost all patience for Griffin almost since the moment he met him.

“We’re all scared shitless right now!” Layla snapped loudly, daring anyone to out-voice her. “But I don’t see any of you locking yourselves away in the only decent room, with the only television, and the only bath,”

Griffin eased himself into a standing position with a grimace. “I didn’t th-think about it in time,” he replied honestly.

“I vote we starve her out,” Layla voted, grinning like a mad woman. “If she’s hungry enough, she’ll unlock the door,”

“Layla! That’s… that’s inhumane!” Eric shouted, horrified. “We can’t do that!”

“We need that room,” Layla snapped back. “Adam didn’t bring his phone, Griffin and Terrence never had one, you broke yours, and mine is dead. We checked everywhere for a charger. Everywhere except Mr. Harrison’s room. And that bitch locked us out! She’s killing us!”

“Keep your v-voice down!” Griffin hissed. He shot a nervous glance at Adam, who signaled that everything was still calm outside. “But yeah, I agree with Layla here. We need to get into that room by any means necessary,”

“Of course you agree, because you’re just a spineless, gutless, wimp, without a single brain cell to call your own!” Eric spat, then he climbed to his feet and also turned to Adam. “This is crazy,”

“Actually, it’s completely practical,” Adam replied, still concentrating on Terrence.

“Adam!”

Adam glanced at the three of them and huffed in quiet frustration. Seeing as this wasn’t about to resolve itself, he leaned back in his chair to deal with the situation. “I never said it was the right thing to do, just that it would technically work. Has anyone just asked her to open the door?”

“Good idea!” Eric exclaimed. He was ready to try just about anything short of starving his crush into submission. “I’ll ask,”

“Sit down, Romeo,” Layla snapped, blocking him from the kitchen doorway. “We don’t need you running upstairs and serenading her through that door. I’ll go knock some sense into Whiny Whynn,”

“No way,” Eric quickly put his foot down. “If you go up there threatening her, you’ll only make matters worse,”

“Fine,” Layla scowled. “Griffin will go,”

“Uh n-no Griffin won’t. Griffin isn’t leaving this room. Because Griffin doesn’t want to die,” he stuttered, offended at being offered up so willingly.

“And Terrence can’t climb the stairs with his bad leg,” Layla gasped in mock despair. Then she smirked at Eric. “So I guess she starves, huh?”

Eric glanced around desperately and caught Adam’s gaze.

Adam gestured out the window.

“I’ll watch Terrence,” Eric promised.

“You don’t have a weapon,” Adam pointed out.

“I have my gun,”

“You don’t have a silent weapon,”

Glancing around the room, Eric reached over to the corner beside the fridge and drew out a broom handle. “I have this. If anything happens you’ll know, and you’ll be back down here in a split second,”

Eric walked over and put his hand on Adam’s shoulder. He stared down at him with pleading eyes. “Please, man. You have to try. We can’t just stop feeding her,”

Adam contemplated Eric for several seconds, then glanced down at his pocket knife.

“Fine,” he sighed. Then he stood up with a determined look in his eyes. “Eric keeps watch. You two keep quiet,”

Layla caught his arm as he passed her. “You’re really this soft?” She wanted to know.

“I’m really this reasonable,” Adam replied. “Like it or not, Whynn is one of us now. But if she doesn’t listen to reason, we’ll try a different tactic,”

“Fine,” Layla raised her hands in surrender. Then she leaned towards Adam and lowered her voice to a tone only he could hear. “Just get us out of here, okay? Preferably alive,”

“I’ll do what I can,” Adam assured her. He flipped open his knife and climbed through the barricade of chairs they placed by the door.

He knew firsthand that those chairs weren’t stopping anybody. The only thing they would probably accomplish would be to interfere with the group’s escape. But Griffin had taken to the idea that they needed to bar the doorway, and refused to listen to reason.

It was the only way they could get the guy to calm down. So he and Terrence threw together a makeshift wall, using anything they could find around the house. From chairs to a storage container, to a blender, they would never need.

After throwing a quick glance around the corner, Adam made his way into the hallway and quickly scanned his surroundings. It had been three weeks since anyone was in this hallway, and, as far as he could tell, nothing had changed.

Adam strode lightly across the dirt-caked, and frayed carpeting.

Nothing except for silence surrounded him, but nonetheless, he stayed wary. He wasn’t letting any of those things sneak up on him. Not again.

Adam took a quick pause before he reached the staircase, and carefully pressed his ear up against the basement door.

Layla and Griffen were the first two survivors in this house, aside from Terrence, who lived in a small abode at the far corner of the property.

The two had been doing homework in Mr. Harrison’s attic before the apocalypse began. Nobody knew things were going to go haywire, or else maybe Mr. Harrison wouldn’t have settled them in and disappeared into his basement. Nobody had seen him since.

Adam adjusted the placement of his ear on the door, still greeted by complete silence. Not a sound. No displacement of air. Not even footsteps. Layla and Griffin said they knocked a couple of times before, but only a few light ones. Nobody was interested in testing their luck too soon.

He sighed and made his way up the old staircase, to the second floor. His feet touched down on the hardwood landing at the top of the stairs. So did his hands, as he ducked beneath the, questionably placed, massive window that was directly beside the landing.

He wasn’t quite sure how well the monsters could see, but, yet again, nobody was too keen on testing it out.

After rolling under the windowsill, Adam found himself face to face with the solid oak door of the master bedroom.

“Whynn,” Adam hissed, scraping his knuckles against the door a couple of times.

“Who is it?” Eysjah Whynn’s voice came from the other side, gravely and broken from underuse.

“Adam,” he whispered in return.

“Adam who?”

“Trex. I’m Adam Trex,”

The silence that followed was long enough that he began to wonder if Whynn had heard him at all. He rose his hand to knock again but was interrupted by a sigh from inside. “I remember Adam Trex. The quiet guy who was always with Emily James, right?”

Adam smiled softly. “Yeah. That’s the one,” That’s what he was always remembered as. The guy with Emily. He loved just being the guy with Emily.

“If you’re Adam, prove it,”

“I don’t know how you expect me to do that,”

“I talked to Emily. She was the closest thing to a friend I ever had,” Whynn responded, the floorboards creaking carelessly under her weight. “If this is Adam, then you’ve never forgotten anything since the day you were born. So tell me everything that’s happened since you got here. Even what nobody else saw,”

Adam bit his lip, unsure of how long he wanted to be in this hallway, but finally consented. “I don’t know much of where you came from. But when I got here I was hunting down a zombie-“

“Homo Necrosis Zombifis,” she corrected him.

“That,” Adam grumbled. He took a frustrated breath before continuing. “I found the… monster… I was looking for it, and I destroyed it. I tried to head back home afterward, but when I went to go outside, I saw hundreds of them swarming the area, so I locked myself in. Layla and Griffin found me, and they were carrying Terrence between them. He’d been attacked, and his left leg was broken.

“We were able to roam the house for a few days until we heard a window break near the front door. As far as we know, none of the zo-“

“Homo Nec-“

“Right, that,” Adam interrupted her. “None of those got into the house, but just to be safe, we brought everything we needed into the dining room and stayed put.

“About a week later, Eric snuck in through the front of the house, and we let him into the room. His story is that he had been holed up in the police station with his father, who went looking for help and never came back. Eric is waiting for the swarm out until he can go back and look for his dad. All he came with was some random stuff in his pockets, his dad’s gun, and a broken phone,”

“Eric has a gun?” Whynn asked, her volume increasing slightly as she turned to face the door.

“Yeah, he does. After that, two days later, we kept hearing people scream. When they were found…” he hesitated. “But Layla wanted us to go outside. Because in Mr. Harrison’s backyard, as you know, is a garden. She was afraid of us running out of… of, uh…”

Adam hesitated again. This time because he heard a sound. Or at least thought he did. Like somebody was whispering. Yet nobody was around…

“Are you still there?” Whynn whispered.

“Yeah, sorry,” he continued, slightly quieter than he had before. “After Layla told us her plan, I volunteered to check if there was anything left in the garden that we could survive off of. The day I went out, I found a leg sticking out of the tomato plants. A leg is attached to a body. Your body,”

“And you tickled me,” Whynn audibly seethed.

“I didn’t mean to. I was trying to pull you out of the plants. I grabbed your leg and you screamed,”

“It was a laugh,” Whynn snapped, a sliver of embarrassment in her tone.

“You laughed, and I told you to shut up, and you got pissed,” Adam recalled hurriedly. Something about that hallway was giving him chills. And not even figuratively. Adam wrapped his jacket a little tighter around himself and attempted to speed up the process. “Then we heard footsteps from outside the gate. You wanted to leave because you said there were more coming. And you didn’t want to stay and become surrounded,”

“And I was right,” Whynn sighed, her voice getting quieter as she adjusted her position on the other side of the door.

“Maybe. But you also could have died if you left. And I made a promise. So I picked you up and dragged you inside against your will. You screamed at me. Everyone downstairs screamed at you. So you took off up the stairs and locked yourself in this room. And all we’ve seen from you since are empty plates of food we slide under the door,” Adam finished, then he scraped the door absentmindedly with the tip of his knife. “Are you satisfied?”

The only answer he got in return, was a key sliding under the door, and glancing off of the toe of his boot. Adam scooped it up and fed it into the lock.

Click.

He breathed a sigh of relief, and carefully swung the door inwards.

The master bedroom was dark and bare. The walls were black, and thick curtains lined the only window in the room. All it seemed to contain was a dresser, a bedside table, a mattress on the ground, a girl, and her small backpack.

Whynn was pale, with long dark hair, and big black glasses sitting on the nightstand. She didn’t even look at Adam when he entered, just lay on the ground, staring at the ceiling.

“What was that all about?” He asked, closing the door behind him as softly as possible.

“You’re the only one here I think I could remotely trust, even if you did kidnap me,” Eysjah shrugged, without sparing him a glance. “If little Miss Sunshine doesn’t strangle me herself, she’d send her brain-dead sidekick to do it for her. I’ve never met this Terrence guy. As for Eric…” she screwed up her lips in disgust. “He creeped me out before he handled firearms,”

“Right, but I did kidnap you,” Adam pointed out, lowering himself into the edge of her mattress.

“Yeah, but at least you did it trying to protect me,” Whynn sighed. “Which isn’t saying much. But it’s more than I can say for anyone else that’s been in my life,”

Adam nodded knowingly, then decided to test his luck with a question of his own. “How did you end up in that tomato plant?”

Eysjah scoffed. “I’ll spare you the story of the last surviving Whynn if you don’t mind,”

“Fair enough,” Adam cleared his throat and surveyed the room. “I was sent up here to look for a phone charger,”

“You don’t need my permission to look around,” Whynn shrugged and waved her hand across the landscape of the bedroom as if inviting him to enjoy a three-piece meal. “Have at it,”

“I already found it,” Adam replied, with a small smile. “Top drawer of the bedside table,”

For the first time since he’d entered the room, Whynn took her eyes off the ceiling. She swiveled her head around to look at the table, then looked back at Adam.

She rose to her feet and wandered over to the drawer and pulled it open, revealing a phone charger and box of breath mints.

“How?” was all she managed to ask.

“The only available outlet is behind the bed. There’s a surge protector plugged into it, sitting under the bedside table about three feet from the tabletop. Three feet is the length of your average iPhone charger. The rest… an educated guess,”

Whynn smiled, impressed. “That’s awesome,”

Adam bit his lip, remembering the last time he’d heard somebody say that about him. And who that person was.

He ran his fingers slowly across the pocket knife and nodded slowly. “You’d think so,”

There were several seconds of silence before he realized that Eysjah was still looking at him.

“You said you came here hunting down a Homo Necrosis Zombifis,” she repeated his story from earlier. “You said you destroyed it. Why that one?”

“It took something,” Adam replied evasively. “It took something very valuable to me,”

“What?”

Adam looked at Whynn. But instead of seeing the nerdy girl with a big attitude that he sometimes saw at school, he saw the only person left that attached him to her. To: “Emily,”

Whynn nodded slowly. “And the promise you made? When you wouldn’t let me go?”

“I promised that I wouldn’t lose anyone else to them,”

“Who did you promise?”

He glanced down at the knife that Emily had given him last Christmas. A Christmas that felt like a lifetime ago. A lifetime ago, a million worlds away.

“Myself,”

Whynn glanced at Adam’s knife, then back up to his eyes. They weren’t just scary intelligent eyes anymore. There was something else there now. A look of someone who would forever be only half of what he knew he could be.

“Don’t be too hard on yourself,” Whynn assured him quietly. “You couldn’t have stopped all of this single-handedly,”

“I didn’t need to stop all of it. I just had one thing to protect,” Adam whispered. The tremor in his voice was relayed by his hands when he accidentally slit his thumb open on the exposed blade of his knife. But the pain didn’t even register on his face.

The memory of those screams. Her screams. The way she begged his name through the door of the closet. He could hear her tears… but he couldn’t break the door down. Two inches. He heard her die two inches away, and he couldn’t even help.

Tears scorched Adam’s eyes and burned his skin as they ran down his face.

“They’re violent, terrifying, creatures,” Whynn breathed, reliving her horrors.

Adam bit his lip and squeezed the blade of his knife until it threatened to cut him open once more.

“Humans learned to fear the man who had nothing to lose,” Adam wiped his face and stood to glare out the window, at the beasts that now roamed his world.

“Pretty soon, so will they,”