WILLA Read online

  WILLA

  WILLA

  Jennifer Reynolds

  Copyright © 2020

  All Rights Reserved

  Cover Copyright © 2020

  Jennifer Reynolds using photos from Pixabay.com

  All Rights Reserved.

  Proofreading provided by Read by Rose.

  Jennifer Reynolds asserts the moral and legal right to be identified as the author of this work. You may not reproduce this novella in any way, nor may you store it in a retrieval system, or transmit it in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission of the owner. The owner is selling this book subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding other than that which it is published and without a similar condition, including this requirement being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  Author’s Note

  This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or real places or events is purely coincidental.

  ***WARNING: ADULT CONTENT AND STRONG LANGUAGE***

  WILLA

  Jennifer Reynolds

  Also, by Jennifer Reynolds:

  Novels:

  ALONE

  Shifter, Supernaturals Book 1

  Resistant

  HIM

  Outcast, Supernaturals Book 2

  Captive, Supernaturals Book 3

  Shore Haven

  AWAKE

  Novellas

  Saying Goodbye

  Marked, Valeterra Series, Book 1

  Short Stories:

  Charles Wallace’s Favorite Toy

  In The Dark

  Leaving Liberty: A Shore Haven Short Story

  Hostage: A Shore Haven Short Story

  Childhood’s End: A Shore Haven Short Story

  Nowhere: A Shore Haven Short Story

  Sweet Sixteen: An Awake Short Story

  Welcome to Edge Burrow: A Shore Haven Short Story

  Coming Soon:

  Fated, Valeterra Series, Book 2

  Dedication

  I dedicate all of the Awake short stories and novellas to those who love the novel. If you, my loyal reader, hadn’t been so excited about Awake’s world, I wouldn’t have had the inspiration to dive back into it so many times.

  I love you.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Epilogue

  1

  “Did you watch the clip I sent you?” my best friend, Lilly, asked.

  Her full, expectant eyes looked up at me from my phone as she spoke. Lilly’s expression said that she was anxiously waiting to find out what I thought of the video.

  “Not yet. I just woke up,” I said, throwing back the covers and sitting on the side of my bed.

  “You’re not up yet? How could you still be asleep with what’s going on?” she asked, dumbfounded.

  “What time is it?” I asked in response.

  “Nine-thirty.”

  “What? Mom was supposed to have gotten me up at eight. I needed to be ready by now for you and Katie to get me. Wait? Why aren’t you guys here already?” I asked, stumbling toward my bathroom.

  “You seriously don’t know what’s happening?”

  Lilly had never sounded as annoyed with me as she did at that moment.

  I rubbed my eyes and focused on my friend’s face. She looked both terrified and excited at the same time. I could hear people talking loudly behind her and see a lot of movement.

  “No. What...?” I asked, trying to make out what her brother, who crossed the screen, was holding.

  “Lilly, get off that damned phone and help us pack,” I heard Lilly’s father yell from somewhere near the phone.

  “Sorry. I have to go. Love you,” my best friend said and made kissing noises into the speaker.

  “I love you, too,” I tried to say, but Lilly hung up before hearing me.

  My friend wasn’t prone to dramatics. Yeah, she got a little overly excited sometimes, but nothing I would consider an overreaction. Something in the way her eyes looked and the franticness of her father’s voice, though, had me a bit worried.

  The fact that Mom hadn’t woken me early, as she said she would, was worrisome as well. Mom was an early bird and relished the times she could wake me before noon, and I wouldn’t grumble and complain about it. More often than not, she’d wake me an hour or so before the time I asked her to so that she could spend time with me. That annoyed me some, but the knowledge of where I would be going later that day would dampen that.

  Going to school was not a thing I willingly woke early for, and neither was church. A day at the river with my friends, on the other hand, was. I was excited because Nathan Summers was supposed to be coming on this trip, and he was so hot.

  After peeing, I wanted to shower and get dressed to see Nathan. I mean, my friends. Instead, I decided to check on Mom. She rarely got sick—thank God for good genes—but when she did, it was always rough. I hoped she wasn’t ill because if she were, I’d have to miss the day with my friends. From the sound of things, Lilly wasn’t going to make it, and I hoped Ben, Nathan’s fraternal twin brother, and the others hadn’t bailed either.

  I checked my phone for messages from the others. No one but Lilly had sent me a text.

  I was at the bottom of the stairs, calling for Mom when I hit play on the video my best friend had sent.

  Mom didn’t answer me, and the screams coming from the video on my phone stopped my forward motion.

  “What the hell,” I said to no one and hit play again when the clip ended.

  This had to be a prank or an excerpt from an upcoming movie. It just had to be.

  Nothing at the start of the video claimed that. The scrolling bar at the bottom of the screen said it was news footage from a TV station in Florida. The actual clip looked like something straight out of The Walking Dead.

  “Mom,” I called again and headed to the living room where I’d left my laptop to charge last night.

  Most things I did on my phone, but I wanted to see the video on a bigger screen.

  As I made my way through the house, I sent Lilly a quick text asking where she’d gotten the video.

  Just as I was circling a corner in the hall that led into the living room, I heard my mother say, “This can’t be happening.”

  “Mom? What’s wrong?” I asked, looking at my mother and not at the television playing in front of her.

  “This isn’t happening,” was all she said.

  “What’s not h...?” I started to ask before cutting my eyes to the screen.

  A video similar to the one I’d just watched on my phone was playing on the television. The scroll on that video said it was taken in Georgia, just south of Atlanta. It was footag
e of people eating other people. The images were more than graphic, something I would’ve never thought a local station would air.

  What the fuck, I thought but didn’t say, though I doubt my mother would have heard.

  Mom was repeating the same three or four similar phrases. Her face was pale, eyes wide, and her hands shook. She didn’t appear to notice me in the room.

  I left her in her shocked state to get my laptop. I took a seat in a chair beside the sofa to Google what I was seeing. The videos had to be a prank. I’d heard stories about a radio station or stations doing something similar a long, long time ago. That event had been about aliens, not zombies.

  To my utter shock, what the anchors were screaming was a zombie outbreak appeared to be true. Every reliable news outlet was saying the same thing, some even showing duplicate footage, others showed different footage, with more people sending them videos from cell phones every few minutes.

  Instagram was abuzz with photos and videos that most people were sharing from someone else’s page. The zombies—and that was what those people were because they sure as hell weren’t cannibals—were everywhere. More than one video showed someone dying and coming back to what those creatures considered life and promptly began eating the nearest person, be it their child, their spouse, their parent, or a stranger.

  The stuff I saw in those first hours was worse than any horror movie I’d ever watched. I didn’t throw up. I think that was because, despite knowing, logically, what I was looking at was real, my brain wouldn’t believe it. What was even harder to comprehend was the time stamp on some of the videos.

  Judging by the oldest video I saw, the first of the outbreak occurred nearly four days ago.

  Four freaking days.

  Zombies had been real in my world for a little over half a week, and I was just then hearing about it.

  I didn’t cry.

  Mom did.

  I was too shocked by the unreality of the situation to cry.

  The only time after calling me to wake me that morning that I talked to Lilly, she was crying. So was her mother. Lilly called to tell me that she and her family were heading to their cabin in Montana. She didn’t think she would have much in the way of cell service when they got there, and her parents wanted them to stay off their phones, especially the Internet for the time being; therefore, Lilly had to call then to say goodbye.

  I sat numbly through the brief conversation.

  Afterward, I tried calling some of my other friends. No one answered.

  Eventually, around noon, I realized that Mom and I hadn’t moved from our places in the living room and that Mom was still repeating her variations of, “I can’t believe this,” mantra.

  “Mom. Mom. Mom,” I said into my mother’s face after leaving my spot in the chair.

  I’d closed the laptop and shoved it aside. I couldn’t see any more. All the informational sites said to keep calm, stay inside, ration food and water, and to let the military control the situation. That would go tits up within a day or so. At least, that’s what happened in movies, TV shows, and books.

  We needed to leave. We needed to pack up everything we had and go to Grandma’s. We needed my dad.

  Dad.

  I hadn’t thought about calling him until that moment.

  “Mom, have you talked to Daddy. Mom, I need you to snap out of it and help me,” I said, taking her by her upper arms and shaking her.

  My mother barely flinched. Her eyes stayed glued to the television.

  Fuck, I screamed in my head.

  Dad was supposed to be flying to New Zealand that morning. Chances were he wouldn’t be able to answer his phone, but I tried anyway. Then, I called my grandma and my Uncle Jamie, my favorite uncle, who always treated me like a person and not a child. No one freaking answered.

  For another hour, I called everyone in my contacts list. Most calls just rang. On some, the operator said the service couldn’t complete my request at that time.

  When I wasn’t on the phone, I was trying to get my mother to talk to me—to help me make a plan—to do something.

  2

  By late afternoon of that first day, our local news channel was sharing footage of empty shelves in grocery stores, packed gun stores, and convenience stores with lines of cars waiting for gas. A few of the shops were price gouging or closing their doors to the public, but not many. I don’t know if their owners thought the outbreak was a hoax or would blow over soon or what.

  “In a few days, the entire city will be locked down,” I said over my mom’s shoulder.

  I understood that what I’d said was correct, but the knowledge was only abstract. I couldn’t honestly picture a world where there would never be food on the shelf of the local grocery store again or that, in less than a week, there wouldn’t be anyone to grow food, let alone package and deliver it.

  Mom was still sitting on the sofa, gently rocking and repeating herself. I was trying to get her to go to the bathroom then join me in the kitchen for supper. Mom wasn’t having any of that. I knew she had to pee and had to be hungry. She hadn’t moved in over eight hours.

  My comment hadn’t affected her. Nothing I’d said all day had appeared to register to her.

  Shaking my head, I went into the kitchen. I’d made us sandwiches. One of the websites I’d visited that day said to eat perishable items first because if the power went out, those items would ruin—that made sense. The canned soup that I’d looked at in our cabinet didn’t expire for six months or longer, and some of the vegetables would last a year.

  I made us large glasses of chocolate milk and cut up fruit to go with the sandwiches. I ate my food in the kitchen. I couldn’t listen to the television or my mother’s muttering any longer. While I ate, I let my eyes wander around the room, and I made a mental list of what we had.

  Mom ate like a bird. She was tall and thin. I wasn’t fat, but I was shorter and thicker than her. We’d have enough food to last the two of us a while if Dad waited out the zombies wherever he was. I hated thinking that about my dad, but he usually ate a fair bit more than Mom and I. He wasn’t morbidly obese. Like Mom, he was tall, and he weighed about two-thirty, and not much of that was muscle.

  We’ll only have enough if someone doesn’t rob us, I thought.

  As soon as the grocery stores run out, desperate people will start taking what others have. That was a fact of nature. I’d seen examples of it on the news during past events and while watching any number of apocalyptic movies or TV shows.

  Mom and I didn’t have enough of any one thing to be able to share, not if we wanted to make it the month or so that I hoped it would take the military to get the situation under control.

  After I’d finished eating, I took Mom her food. I sat it right in front of her on the coffee table, but she didn’t notice.

  Next, I walked the house, thinking of where I could hide our stuff and how I was going to protect it. As I did so, I attempted to call my father for the millionth time. After that, I tried my uncles. They could give me advice, even if they couldn’t help me. They had their families to care for, and they wouldn’t come here to take our supplies. It didn’t matter what they would or wouldn’t do because they never answered their phones.

  A narrow passage that led to the attic stairs sat in the back of the upstairs hall closet. Mom did some half-hearted research when we first moved in to try to find out why the entrance to the attic was in such a strange place, but she never found an answer.

  I removed the panel that led to that creepy hallway and went upstairs. The attic was large and dirty. I swear things crawled around in the dust. With all my soul, I didn’t want to spend a second in the room, but I also knew it would be the perfect place to hide our things.

  With an idea in mind, I went to Mom for help, but she took no notice of me. I would have to do something soon to get her to snap out of it. For the time being, I would let her have her freak out. In her current frame of mind, she wouldn’t be of any help to me anyway.

&n
bsp; I found a few plastic totes in our closets. They were full of junk, so I had to dump out their contents, but they worked perfectly for what I needed. I crammed as much stuff as I possibly could in each and stored them in the attic. All of our toilet paper but one roll, all medicines except what we would need for the next few days, all but the minimal amount of first aid supplies, all flashlights, candles, matches, blankets, towels, etc., went into the attic. After that, I started on cleaning products and food. I only kept out the bare minimum of what we might need for the night and next day.

  I had a plan that each day, I would retrieve what we needed. I left the jewelry and money lying about, but credit cards and checkbooks, I hid. We might need the cash and gold later, but at that moment, necessities and food were my priority.

  The sun had long since set by the time I’d finished. Even with me working around her, Mom hadn’t moved or touched her food. I went to look out the living room window. My neighborhood seemed quiet. A few lights were on, but no one was outside. Only every fifteen to thirty minutes a car would pass.

  Behind me, the television showed a different world. People across the continent were freaking out, looting, killing anyone who remotely acted strangely, and trying to go into hiding. The army was bombing cities. The National Guard was working to secure towns and government buildings. Not since 9-11 had there been so much chaos on American soil.

  I hadn’t been alive back then, but I’d heard people talk. I’d seen video footage of the attack. In the aftermath of the events, we’d come together as a people, though. Judging by what the reporter was saying, we weren’t now. Our country was in a free for all.

  Despite the news reports, and because I was tired from lugging stuff upstairs, I didn’t barricade my doors and windows. Yeah, I made sure they were locked. I even moved some furniture around to make it hard for someone to break in and to give Mom and me enough time to escape if that happened. Other than that, I did nothing else to protect us. I didn’t even carry a knife with me to bed after I’d cleaned up that night.

  We didn’t own a firearm of any kind. Mom wouldn’t allow one in the house. I don’t think Dad had an opinion on them either way, but my uncles were always warning us of the dangers of not having one. Even if we had a gun, I didn’t know how to shoot, meaning it would be useless to me anyway.