Free It All Comes Down To Zombies: Sarah by Rayne Millaray

Sarah was standing on the sidewalk, suitcases in her hands and duffle bags slung over her shoulders, staring up the road in disbelief. She’d just finished packing the essentials expecting to stuff them into the trunk of her beat up Chevy, but when she got to the curb, her Chevy was gone. So were her husband, Max, and their cat, Sylvester.
     
    She knew she should be angry, enraged even, but after the night they’d had, disbelief was all she could muster.
     
    Sarah let the duffles slide off her shoulders, stood one of the suitcases on its end, and sat down. Suddenly, the “essentials” didn’t seem all that essential.
     
    Her world was very quiet. With the power cut, not even the constant hum of the electric wires was filling up the void where society had been just the day before. It was unnerving. After the nightmare she and Max had survived, she’d expected explosions, fires, first responders everywhere, other survivors—but there was nothing. Just a bunch of busted up suburban prefabs, a few dead bodies, and an overwhelming silence.
     
    “Hello?” Sarah said, just barely above a whisper. She waited a beat before yelling, “Hello? Is anyone here?”
     
    Nothing.
     
    Sarah sighed and stood up. She knew she couldn’t stay there. Her house wasn’t defensible by one person—at least, not without a lot of repairs—and who knew if those things would be back? The monsters had torn through walls, smashed out all the windows, busted down a couple doors. Sarah found herself glad she and Max had decided not to buy for a couple more years. She had no idea how they would have paid for the repairs when this thing was over.
     
    “What is that noise?” Sarah asked the ravished neighborhood.
     
    At some point, a low grumble had started in the east. She didn’t know how long she’d been sitting there, or when the noise started. But it was getting closer.
     
    Sarah stared down the road in the direction from which it was coming. She briefly considered hiding, but decided against it. If it was someone with a car, maybe they’d get her the fuck out of there. If it was those things again, maybe they’d kill her, and she could stop freaking out about the fact that Max had just left her there without any escape.
     
    While she watched, a pickup turned on to her street a few blocks up the road. Sarah breathed a sigh of relief and stood up. She whipped off her white hoodie, and started waving it in the air.
     
    “Hey! Hey, over here! Hey!”
     
    The truck slid to a stop in front of her, and the window rolled down.
     
    “S…Sarah? Sarah, is that really you? I mean, I’d hoped I’d find you, but I don’t think I really believed I would.”
     
    Sarah froze.
     
    “No way.” she said. “No fucking way. NO FUCKING WAY.”
     
    Her hands began to tremble. She clenched them into fists and chewed the inside of her cheek to stop the wave of nausea that washed over her when she heard the man’s voice. It was like she’d hit the first peak of a roller coaster, and was in free fall, barely restrained by her tenuous grasp on reality and the flimsy straps on the tank top she was wearing.
     
    She didn’t have to look into those crystal blue eyes to know it was him. She could feel the slime ooze from his tongue and try to enclose her in its sticky embrace; smell the stench of the lies he’d told, and would tell, to put her squarely under his thumb.
     
    Sarah took a few deep breaths as her cheeks began to burn. She felt utterly ridiculous and a little stupid for allowing this man to see how he affected her. She began chiding herself for giving him even this much control over her again. Her pulse began to slow, and the nausea faded. When she felt herself regaining control, she opened her eyes and glared at the man ducking down in the driver’s seat.
     
    “What’re you doing here, Jimmy?” Sarah asked, her voice surprisingly steady.
     
    “Saving you. You wanna argue, or you wanna find somewhere safe to hole up for