Resurrection: A Zombie Novel, - [ereader manga .TXT] 📗

“All right, listen up,” Lane said. He stood up front near the windows where a little more light came into the store so everybody could see him. Annie watched from a distance. Everyone watched from a distance. Everyone but Bobby and Roland, who did not leave his side and always had their weapons in sight.

Annie couldn’t figure out why they had to be so aggressive. Survivors should stick together and not fight each other.

“Kyle,” Lane said. “I need you up here so we can figure out this boat thing. Parker, you too. I want to keep an eye on you. And Annie, you go outside and unload that truck. Hughes tells me you’ve got a bag of fresh clothes out there.”

“I do,” she said. “Thank you.”

Finally, she could clean up properly. She had half washed the blood and mud and muck off her hands and her face, but she still looked and felt like she’d crawled through a charnel house. She twisted the ring on her finger and pulled on it a bit, revealing a clean white band of skin underneath, the only place on her body that wasn’t disgusting.

“What happened to you, anyway?” Lane said. “I—” He paused. “Wait.” Squinted at her just slightly. “Don’t I know you?”

She didn’t recognize him at all.

“I don’t think we’ve met,” she said.

He folded his arms over his chest and looked at her harder. “I’m certain we have. You look more than familiar.”

“I don’t know many cops in Seattle. But maybe you pulled me over one time.” She doubted he was really a cop like he’d said, but she had to say something.

“No. I’ve seen you recently. I know you from after all—this—happened. Not from before.”

He could be right. She didn’t remember anything between coffee with her sister in Olympia and Hughes shooting at her on the road. Maybe she had met Lane before. During the interval.

“You don’t look familiar,” she said.

Lane didn’t know she’d lost part of her memory. Nobody told him.

He was silent for a couple more moments. He kept staring. Then he said, “This is driving me crazy. How could I not know where I’ve seen you? I’ve hardly seen anyone recently.”

She was getting a little spooked now. Was something blocking both their memories, only whatever it was blocked hers more strongly than his?

“I’d better go get the stuff out of the truck now,” she said.

Lane stared at her for another couple of seconds, then nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “Go get the stuff. Bobby, go with her. Make sure none of those things are outside.”

Bobby gingerly went out ahead of her, scanning the lot, then looking left and right before squinting in the distance across the street. She followed him out, hefted the large backpack Hughes had stuffed with supplies over her shoulders, grabbed her bag of clothes, and took everything inside. Bobby followed her in without carrying anything. She made two more trips with Bobby ostensibly covering her in case she was attacked, but she knew his real job was to mind her.

She laid everything against the wall near the front door.

“Parker,” Lane said. “Unload this stuff.”

Parker huffed and took his sweet time.

“I’m going to change my clothes if you don’t mind,” Annie said.

Lane nodded. “Please do.”

She grabbed a flashlight and took her clothes into the women’s restroom in back and shut the door. There were no windows in there, and therefore no light with the door closed. Nor was there a bathtub or shower, of course. Just a toilet, a sink, a mirror, a roll of paper towels, and vulgar scribblings on the wall next to the toilet. She flicked on the flashlight, set it on the back of the sink, and took her nasty clothes off.

She smelled bad. That was especially noticeable now.

She was certain there’d be no hot water, but she twisted the knob anyway. The water was cold, of course, but there was liquid soap in a dispenser on the wall. She shivered as she cleaned herself as well as she could, starting with her armpits and working down toward her feet. She felt a wound on the back of her shoulder that had scabbed over. It didn’t hurt. She hadn’t even noticed it until now and had no idea how it got there. But if it was long past hurting, it was most likely long past getting infected, so she didn’t worry. She dried herself off with towels from the roll and spent ten minutes scrubbing the gross mat of God-only-knew-what out of her hair under the faucet with hand soap.

When she put on fresh clothes, she felt like a new human being. She must have been waiting ages for this, but she could only remember waiting the past couple of hours. How much time had passed since she woke up on the forest floor just before Hughes shot at her? Four hours at the most? It felt like four weeks.

She shone the flashlight in her face and studied herself in the mirror. She looked presentable now. Pretty even, not like a ghoul. Her hair was longer. It was down past her shoulders now. She supposed that’s what happens when you lose eight weeks of memory since your last haircut.

Her amnesia was damn peculiar and not what she would have expected. Even though she couldn’t remember anything about the last two months, her sense of confusion was going away. Everything made sense now. She could only explain it one way. Her conscious mind couldn’t access all of her memory, but her subconscious mind did not have that problem.

The plague and its attendant destruction was such a tremendous event that it rewired her brain. So while she couldn’t remember the events, she sure as hell noticed the rewiring. She thought of an axiom from her psych class in college up in Seattle: neurons that fire together, wire together. Her professor used smoking as an example. Smokers make all kinds of associations with cigarettes. Drinking coffee, having a beer, getting in the car, stepping outside. That’s why it’s so hard to quit. Coffee, beer, driving, even stepping outside make smokers who are trying to quit think of cigarettes. A person suffering from amnesia who had no idea they were a smoker would still think of cigarettes if someone gave them a beer. That’s how powerful brain wiring is.

If epic devastation wasn’t powerful enough to reroute her circuits, nothing was.

She was no longer the same person she used to be. And while she couldn’t remember her transformation, she sure as hell noticed that she was transformed.

Her sense of danger was more pronounced. She understood on a cellular level that required no explanation from Kyle or Hughes or anyone else that the entire planet was hostile, that resources had to be scavenged, that law and order were finished, that she had to fend for herself, that every single thing that humans had ever built anywhere—except perhaps Egypt’s great pyramids—would be ground down. She had internalized these truths and imprinted them into her being. Amnesia couldn’t change that even if she couldn’t remember it happening.

But something else had also imprinted itself into her being. Something else had happened to her. Something aside from the plague. Something aside from the probable deaths of everyone she had ever known. Something aside from the fact that she’d never see her Seattle apartment again, never see South Carolina again, never see anybody she recognized ever again, and might not even survive the next twenty minutes. Something in addition to the fact that the world was in ashes.

She sensed a secret knowledge buried somewhere inside that was banging on the lid of her subconscious and trying desperately to get out. She knew it as well as she knew her name was Annie Starling. But what was it? What was she forgetting? What on earth could it possibly be?

She stared hard at herself in the mirror.

Look, she thought. Look hard. The answer is there.

But she couldn’t remember.