428 North Cherry Lane

The woman had been walking for roughly 7 hours before she felt it.

A heavy, sickening, feeling in her chest. The kind that made her throat feel like it was closing in on itself. The kind she felt after Jeremy.

No.

There was nothing about sadness that made her strong. There was nothing about tears that did anything for her anymore.

A wave crashed upon the shore. She stopped, and slowly turned her head towards the body of water.

Jeremy was flying through the ocean on his boogie board, throat laughing the way he used to. There was something so specific about the reason she loved his laugh.

He didn’t care that his voice cracked.

So many of her patients cried over such a thing. The embarrassment of pre-pubescent inconveniences was enough to get a well-adjusted kid to drop out of the 7th grade. But Jeremy didn’t care. It’s as though the thought of feeling ashamed of such an inevitable, awkward, life-stage blew his mind.

Another wave crashed. The sound startled the woman. She stared at the beach, rubbing her eyes. Jeremy was gone. Her throat started to shrink.

“No.”

It took her a moment to realize she had said the word out loud.

She inhaled.

She exhaled.

Her meditative skills were long gone at this point, but she liked to try to remember.

Something about breath. Something about recognizing it.

She inhaled again, this time too deeply, and winced. Her eyes began to look downward, toward the source of pain. She stopped herself. She didn't want to see it.

The woman kept moving.

Walking along the shore was a different experience now.

It used to be her favorite place. She used to watch kids, full of life, running at the abrasive water with a kind of fearless arrogance.

They were angry at the waves.

It was a kind of anger only felt in that stage of adolescence.

“They ran at the waves with the same cocky bravery required to confidently flip your mom off for not letting you watch MTV.”

MTV. She wondered if she would ever have the chance to meet anyone who knew what that was. How could she carry on if she couldn’t get wine drunk and binge old episodes of “NEXT” with post-apocalyptic friends?

She could feel the whisper of a laugh rumbling in her chest, but it didn’t budge.

She wouldn’t let it.

She looked down at her right hand.

It was hot-pink and sweaty from clutching onto the necklace so tight. She didn’t really know why she felt the need to hold it so firmly. But she couldn’t stop. She had tried on multiple occasions. It was starting to irritate her skin. She looked directly at the accessory.

The blood-stained silver necklace still managed to sparkle back at her. From beneath the coils of the chain, a shiny, heart-shaped locket peeked through.

She held it to the sky with bloodied, taped up fingers, and observed the initials engraved on the front. She repeated the letters, softly;

“ABC”

“That’s right!”

The woman swiftly turned around, startled by the voice. It was young, and angelic, belonging to the type of kid who always has a bad knock-knock joke to tell.

It was perfect.

She removed her knife, and swung it around her.

“Who’s there?!”

“My name is just like the alphabet! Angelica Bretta Campbell! ABC!”

The woman swerved to try and locate the voice, but her foot caught what felt like an old beer bottle. She fell backwards, onto the sand.

She looked around.

There was no one. She was alone on the beach. She scanned the sand repeatedly until she was sure of that.

But it sounded exactly like Angelica.

Maybe-

“NO!”

This time she screamed it. Her hand shot over her mouth. She had become careless.

It was on purpose.

The only two children she was responsible for were dead and it was her fault. It was her

fucking

“FAULT!”

The woman gasped as her voice echoed around her. She looked to her hand and realized, in horror, that she was no longer holding the necklace. She manically looked around before finding the crumpled locket laying clumsily in the sand. She forcefully clutched it with a new intensity, her fingernails digging into the flesh of her palm. She searched her breast pocket with frantic fingers and removed a faded slip of paper.

“428 N CHERRY LANE”

She turned it around to reveal a family photo, clouded by water marks and mud.

A beautiful Latina woman wearing a bright pink dress covered in yellow flowers stood beaming. Beside her was a man. He was tall, black, strong. Undeniably gorgeous. He wore a tan sweater over a white collared shirt. She felt comforted locking into his gaze.

He had a mona lisa smile.

Standing in front of the couple was a small girl. Her skin was the color of deep caramel. Her wide eyes were the deepest brown she had ever seen. She wore a pale yellow dress. A perfectly made, pink bow sat perched on the left side of her head. The woman looked at her expression. This time, she was unable to hold back the laugh that escaped her lips.

The girl, no older than 6, was sporting the biggest pout she had ever seen. Both corners of her mouth were turned so far down that her lips formed a perfect, upside down, half circle. Her eyes were filled with tears. The woman closed her eyes, recalling a memory;

The girl, dirty from head to toe, attempted to make a castle out of mud. Her eyes were intently focused on the project at hand as she told the woman the story behind the picture.

"I was sad because my mommy said I couldn't wear my purple tutu. That's why I ruined the picture. I wasn't very nice that day."

The woman had quietly observed her position, immediately picking up on the child's shame.

The girl sat under a pitiful hut made of leaves and sticks. The woman remembered regretting all those times she made fun of her wife for watching Bear Grylls. She could hear her sarcastic voice in her head.

"See? I told you Bear Grylls would come in handy for the apocalypse. Who's laughing now?"

The woman smiled to herself with her eyes closed, slouched over in the sand.

When she opened them, she found her wife standing before her.

She was wearing her favorite dress. The one she wore while painting. The woman loved that dress. Long and white, covered in delicate lace, smeared messily with paint. Reds and yellows and blues danced clumsily along the front of it. The dirtied, off-white hem lay flat on the sand.

"Though I gotta say, I REALLY thought there would be more zombies."

The woman blinked and rubbed her eyes, in a daze.

“Sonni?"

She started to get up, her locket-free hand pushing down behind her. She immediately recoiled as her hand landed on the beer bottle she had tripped on earlier.

Her stomach turned as the grim reality set in.

It wasn’t a beer bottle.

The woman slowly directed her gaze behind her. It was a femur bone, laying in the wet sand. She was infatuated with how motionless it was.

The flesh that used to be its home had not fully decayed.

“ABC! My name is like the alphabet!”

She could see Angelica in her peripheral vision, making a sand angel. She began to direct her gaze toward the child.

"No."

The woman slowly rose from the packed sand, gripping the wound that she wasn't quite ready to face.

She wasn’t far now.

______________________________________________

She had been walking for roughly 45 minutes when she saw the street sign. No longer on the shore, the woman now walked through the small residential streets that used to be described as “quaint”.

The homes had been desecrated. It was like looking at the cover of a haunted HGTV magazine. She looked upon a two-story white house with a navy blue trim. Scrawled across the door in paint were 3 words that sent a chill down her spine.

G OD i S D E AD

The woman kept moving.

She tried increasing her pace to a jog, and immediately fell to her knees in blinding pain. Her reduced her scream came out a muffled, guttural, howl.

Resigned, she removed her hand, and looked down.

It was worse than she had anticipated. She couldn't locate the wound through all of the blood. The reality of her prognosis sank in. She whispered one somber word.

“Damnit.”

She grit her teeth.

She kept moving.

______________________________________________

She didn't know how long she had been standing in front of the home. Her vision had started to blur, but she could just make out the 3 numbers perched above the door frame.

"428."

The windows were shattered. The exterior of the house was overtaken by weeded vines, and plagued with bullet holes.

She stared blankly as a disturbing feeling washed over her.

Relief.

The interior was broken in every way imaginable, but its previous beauty was so obvious she couldn’t help but gawk at it. Exposed brick surrounded a white, porcelain fireplace. It was smeared with dried blood.

She headed upstairs.

It took her less than 30 seconds to find them.

They were lying on their bed, almost spooning. Completely unrecognizable.

They had been dead for a while.

The woman stumbled over to them and knelt on the ground. She lifted her shaking hand that gripped the locket, and lowered it onto the bed. She struggled to find the right words to say to their lifeless corpses.

"I'm... I'm so sorry... I don't know how it happened. I thought she was safe. I tried so hard to hide her. I thought--"

The woman was interrupted by her own sobs. She choked on them. They erupted out of her like an angry volcano. She tried her best to push words out as she desperately gulped for air.

"She... wanted to bring it... she wanted to bring this back to you. I am so...I just--”

“ABC!”

The woman whipped around to find Angelica, standing in the doorway. She looked like an angel. The only imperfection she could find was one, perfectly symmetrical hole where the bullet had gone through her forehead.

A soft smile came across the woman's dirty, tear-stained face.

“Angelica Bretta Campbell.”

Angelica ran over to her and grabbed the heart shaped locket from her hand.

“Thank you Jane.”

Angelica kissed her on the cheek before crawling into the bed.

She tried to reach out and touch her, but stopped as her hand crossed her eye-line. It was wet with blood. She threw it back over her wound, and began to cry.

"It's okay."

Sonni sat cross-legged on the floor beside her. She placed her hand on top of the one Jane had pressed against her wound.

"I don't want to die, Sonni. I’m really scared.”

Sonni put her hand softly under Jane's chin. She lightly kissed her chapped lips.

"Of course you are. Death is fucking terrifying."

She never sugarcoated anything. It brought Jane ease.

Jeremy's head was resting on her lap. She wasn't sure how long he'd been there. She could no longer decipher wether any of them were real.

Jeremy gently lifted Jane's hand from her side. He placed it on his heart. Blood poured freely from the wound.

Jane smiled. She was dead in less than 5 minutes.

428 North Cherry Lane fell back into silence.