The Dead Survive Read Online Free PDF

thought in language caustic enough to make their ears bleed.
    When the men were sent packing with orders to be across the river and into Ohio by nightfall, I drank for two straight days. I missed my shifts clearing debris from the recent attacks, and my mood didn’t improve once I sobered up. Not that I was sober for long at that point. We were all assigned jobs to help support and protect the community, and up until then I’d managed to fulfill my obligations between bottles, but in the immediate aftermath of what I saw as gross betrayal, I couldn’t find the will to care.
    A little more than a week later, the biggest swarm of zombies so far attacked the Compound. The residents suffered their first loss of life that day—three men caught trying to get back inside the wall after a scouting mission—and it hit everybody hard. It was decided to have a day of mourning and reflection to try to reconnect with the tattered remains of our own humanity.
    Amelia thought it would be a good time to resolve the animosity between us. It would have been better to wait till I wasn’t drinking, but those times were few and far between. She approached me near the spot we were using to sort and allocate building materials as I was unloading some debris from a rusty wheelbarrow, a little unsteady on my feet from lingering intoxication.
    The sight of her put me immediately on my guard. Her honey-colored hair was tied back haphazardly, and her dark jeans bore powdery hand prints and miscellaneous stains, suggesting she was coming from a shift in the communal kitchen. But it was her shirt that really sent my attitude into overdrive. Disney? Really? The insipid rodent stretched across her breasts seemed to mock me with memories of a past I could never regain.
    She halted several feet away, safely outside my over-sized personal space, shuffling her feet and rubbing her hands on her dirty jeans.
    “Hey, Ellen…can we talk for a minute?”
    Great. My conversations, other than Melissa, were kept as close to monosyllabic replies to unavoidable questions as possible. The last semi-normal conversation I’d had was with Matt the fateful day we decided to try to keep the wholesale store running in the midst of the panic. If I had to talk, why did it have to be with Amelia?
    I shrugged, bracing one hand on the wheelbarrow in an attempt to disguise my blood alcohol level. “Sure, I guess.”
    She tilted her head and squinted a little, either at my sullen reluctance, or at my unsteady posture. “Do you want to go sit?”
    “No, this is fine.” I didn’t want to prolong the impending discussion, whatever it might be. I also didn’t want her to see me try to walk without weaving or stumbling.
    The corners of her mouth tightened and turned down as she continued to study me. “Okay, fine. I’ve been talking with some of the women who were rescued with you. I want to make sure you’re all comfortable here, that you feel welcome.” She hesitated, glancing down and brushing ineffectively and a floury hand print. “Look, I know it can be hard to readjust in a new place, to feel safe again, after what you experienced. I wanted to let you know if you have any questions about things here, or if you need to talk about what happened, you can come to me, any time.”
    I wanted to laugh. I wanted to scream. I wanted to throw up. Instead, I looked up at the warm spring sky, watching for a moment as a bold white cumulus cloud began to pass over the sun, giving a promise of a few minutes’ shade.
    She started to speak again, but I didn’t want to hear it, so I took a deep breath and stared into her startled eyes. “Why the ever-loving fuck would I ever want to talk about what happened?” Profanity was new to me since the apocalypse. I was getting rather good at it, at least in my head, though it still shocked me a bit to hear it coming out of my mouth.
    Amelia held her palms out toward me, raised in a calm-the-hell-down posture. “I know, I know,” she