Sycamore Connelly's returning to her hometown of Edenmouth, Maine, after dropping out of college. Sebastian Do is stuck living with his parents, having never left to begin with. Adrian Steiner, once a drifter, is starting to put down roots. All three's plans are disrupted when Edenmouth begins to swarm with zombies, and time itself becomes caught in a loop. Now the trio must work together to find a way out. But strange forces are at play, and they may not be alone...
“Dude! Dude, are you still there?”
My mind snaps back to attention. I don’t know why I get like this when I’m behind the wheel, especially on the highway. Maybe it’s the steel-colored January sky above me, the way it collides with the fading pavement under my tires at the vanishing point of the horizon. Maybe it’s the warmth of my seat heater lulling me into a driver’s trance (I’m too caffeinated for sleep, thank God), maybe it’s just my poorly-medicated ADHD getting the better of me or something.
Or something.
“Yeah, I’m still here,” I grumble. The person I’ve got on speaker right now is my childhood best friend Sebastian; his house is my destination at the moment. Seb’s one of those guys who never really left his hometown (our hometown); when I moved out west for college, he stuck around to get a foot in the workforce early. We kept in touch online those four years, messaging back and forth nearly every day, trash-talking each other over rounds of Counterstrike on Friday nights.
Funny. I was the highfalutin smart one with the big ideas, and yet I ended up burning out ten times harder than he did.
“What’s your ETA?” Seb asks.
“Not too far off,” I answer. I fumble for the to-go cup in my center console and take a sip of coffee, wincing at how hot it still is. “I’m gonna hit the rest stop, and then Edenmouth’s my next exit.”
“Can’t you skip the rest stop?” There’s a note of anxiety in Seb’s voice. Huh.
“I gotta pee, man.”
“Fine, just make it quick. Weather forecast says there might be another blizzard tonight.”
“What are you, my dad?” The blue sign indicating the turnoff is coming into view. Like a siren song to my eyes. I begin to pull off the turnpike, through the little cover of iced-over trees and towards that grody concrete building.
Seb drops the anxious voice and takes on a ridiculously cheesy affect, audible even over my phone’s busted speakers. “Yes, daughter,” he says, “and I’m very proud of you.” I’d roll my eyes if we were in person, but right now it’s just making me grin. God, I missed him.
He’s cracking another joke, but I’m distracted again as I roll through to find a spot to park. The giant parking spaces for semi trucks, the regular human-sized spaces, the expanse of dead grass where exhausted travelers take their dogs to do their business…
“It’s empty.”
“What’s empty?” Seb asks. It takes me a second to realize I was thinking out loud.
“The rest stop,” I answer finally. “It’s a ghost town over here. Not even any trucks in the big lot.” I settle on a space right up in front of the door, feeling strange and exposed with the fact that there are actually options this time. Normally my luck is terrible when it comes to parking lots. I engage the parking brake and turn the keys to off, sighing along with the car as it purrs to a stop around me. Leaning back in my seat for a second before the cold starts to creep back in.
“Seb–” I turn towards my phone only to be met with a solemn boop-boop-boop and a home screen. Damn thing dropped my call. Picking it up reveals a strange culprit: the cell signal is suddenly down to one bar. Weird. It was at a full five bars on the turnpike…
Ugh, whatever. It’s getting too cold to sit in the car with my phone like this. I yank my keys out by the attached bunny-shaped keychain and pocket them, along with my phone and wallet. Maybe there’ll be a vending machine I can grab some chips from. Seb can wait ‘til I’m off the turnpike for me to call him back; he may be impatient, but he’ll understand.
The ladies’ room is surprisingly nice, as opposed to the grody concrete facade. It’s tiled and painted in crisp blue-green of a richness you’d normally only see in a public pool. No stray paper towels or pieces of TP are scattered across the floor. Cleaning staff must’ve been through recently.
After the obvious business, I stick my hands under the motion-sensing tap and immediately yelp. Christ, that’s cold. It’s like the water heater in this place is broken. Come to think of it, maybe it is broken. Wincing through the chilly water, I soap up and rinse off anyway. Clean or not, this is still a rest stop bathroom, and I’m not about to take any chances here.
My reflection stares back at me from the little cracked mirror as I dry my hands with a paper towel. She’s a mousy young woman, big dark eyes set in a wintry pale face that currently wears a pink flush across its sharp little nose. Her hair is a dull shade somewhere between brown and true black, just barely long enough to be tied back in a ponytail. (Maybe I should cut it shorter.) It’s all topped off with a pair of Coke-bottle glasses and a red buffalo plaid shirt under a sturdy gray coat. I can never decide if all of this is cute or completely unremarkable. To be honest, I might be aging out of “cute”.
Doesn’t matter. I toss the balled-up paper into the trash can and elbow my way out the heavy door, stuffing my hands into my coat pockets against the biting chill. The silence is still eerie as I crunch across the frosty dead lawn to my car. It’s been years since I was somewhere as quiet and unpopulated as this. Hearing the beep-beep cut through the air when I hit the unlock button almost makes me jump. Music, I ponder as I re-enter the driver’s seat. Music might be nice.
The car’s still warming up, so I fiddle the knobs of the radio to try and find the local top 40 station. It switches through static, a talk radio show I’ve never heard of, some classical music station… No top 40, though. I resign myself to the classical music and yank my car into reverse. Let’s try and beat that blizzard.
In my driver’s haze, it takes a second for the continued off-ness to truly hit me. It’s hard not to space out a little. The first parts of the 1812 Overture are smoothing over the cracks in my addled brain, my coffee has cooled to a drinkable temperature, and the turnpike is empty.
Oh my God, the turnpike is empty.
Doesn’t make any sense. Sure, there wasn’t much traffic when I pulled into the rest stop, but at least there were some cars. Assholes passing me on my right, semi trucks with worrying political messages plastered onto the rear of their trailers, carpooling families driving slowly in the left lane. But now it’s just nothing. My skin is beginning to crawl into goosebumps, despite the warmth of my little car cocoon. Keep moving. I have to keep moving. I can fully process the implications of this when I get to Seb’s place. The sign for Edenmouth comes into view after what feels like a hundred years, and I breathe a little sigh of relief.
Slowing down as I drive along the all-too-familiar roads into Edenmouth, avoiding pot holes and ice patches and mud puddles, is paradoxically relaxing. It gives me an actual task, something to keep my mind off the little weirdness that happened back there. The 1812 Overture is beginning to escalate, so I turn it down a few notches. I can only take so much distraction.
Oh, look. A few cars are parked outside the cute little cluster of townhouses on Stiller. There’s even a group of actual human beings nearby. It’s three people, I’m guessing middle-aged men, dressed in grubby high-vis gear like they’re coming home from work at some construction site. Something’s off about the way they’re standing, though; I can’t put my finger on it, but it’s enough that I slow to a crawl on instinct. Not about to get yelled at for speeding through a residential area, especially not by guys who might be up to something. One of the aforementioned guys turns to look at me, and…
His face.
It’s a bloodless blue-gray, like a corpse left out in the cold. His eyes are unfocused, dull, and discolored to an unnatural pale sheen. There’s blood around his mouth. Dripping down his front. On his hands.
On all of them as the three of them turn to look at me.
Ice fills my veins and I gun it the hell out of there. Two sides of my brain are at war, as I keep driving, as I try to control my shaky breaths. One is desperately trying to rationalize what I was looking at. Maybe those guys were just sick, or playing a prank, or they all had bad nosebleeds, or something. The other side of my brain knows the word. I’ve seen the movies. I’ve read the books.
The word is zombie.
What else can I do? I keep driving, tracing my route to Seb’s place. Maybe I can talk about it with him there. Yeah. If those men were just celebrating Halloween a little on the late side, it’ll make for a nice little story he and I can laugh about. And if not… I don’t know what to do if not. The pit in my stomach is growing.
More people wandering around sidewalks as I enter the more residential parts of town. Some of them are limping, stumbling a little bit, like they’re not quite sure what to do with their legs. Some aren’t quite dressed for this weather, as if they just kind of walked through their front doors without bothering to reach for the coat rack. All of them are varying shades of corpse gray. Many of them– so many of them– are stained with blood. They seem to travel aimlessly, as though they’re only moving for the sake of moving. A few of them stand still. I try my hardest not to make eye contact with any of them.
The little cul-de-sac that Seb lives on is finally coming into view. It’s not exactly a rich neighborhood, but it’s cute, especially around this time of year when people’s Christmas lights are still up. Any other time, I’d be on a massive nostalgia trip right now. I have fond memories of this place: getting dropped off here for playdates as a kid, swinging by to pick Seb up for school after I got my license.
But there’s another cluster of those corpse people– no, those zombies– here, too. More like a pair, now that I’m getting a better look. There’s a woman in a black coat locked in some kind of embrace with a guy in a denim jumpsuit.
Oh God, it’s not an embrace. I think she’s biting him.
The man struggles against her, tries to wrench her jaws off his shoulder. His booted feet slip and stumble on the pavement before finding purchase again as he drops his center of gravity. He reaches for something in his pocket, holds it to the zombie woman’s side, and a loud pop echoes around the cul-de-sac before the woman drops like a stone.
Now that the guy’s free, I can see he’s hurt bad. Blood is oozing from his shoulder, seeping bright red through the fabric of his much-too-thin jacket. There’s a different wound in his side, the same side he got bitten on, which he reflexively clutches at with his good hand. He’s visibly shaking, too, with a lurching tremor that looks like more than just the cold getting to him. The clutching hand isn't empty; he’s still holding that gun. Should I do something? What the hell can I do? I can’t just sit here in my car like an awkward jackass–
The man looks up at me. Looks at me with a horrible, pained expression that I’ll be seeing in my dreams.
He points his gun at me.
Another loud pop echoes around the cul-de-sac and