The Unsatisfied

I could feel myself fighting desperately to float back up. To open my eyes at another start and another chance. Past the heavy and the dread. She was all I had left in the world, and I would not let her down if it was the last thing I did.

My sleep cycles had been unpredictable since the day I lost her more than a year and a half ago now. Some days I could not sleep even two hours straight and other days I could feel my grief powered exhaustion weighing me down into a deep coma. I fought like hell to wake myself at those times. If I didn’t, I could easily sleep more than a day and to do that could be a deadly mistake.

I had been traveling through dead zones across near abandoned cities all throughout the Southwestern region of America and had been nearly caught by both law enforcement and the unsatisfied more times than I could count. My daughter, Talisa, and I had gotten separated when our small town in Missouri was ordered into an emergency evacuation due to a fast spread. Fast spreads were areas of the unsatisfied that spread like wildfire to the point where evacuation was the only option.

The military officials assigned to our city put everyone in the city on buses that sent us to different safe zones that could accommodate us within neighboring states. We didn’t have a choice of where we were allowed to go and weren’t allowed to take anything other than our grab bags. We had been a bit spoiled up to that point with having been able to continue our lives more comfortably than other places in the US after the initial spread began sixteen years ago. Talisa had only been four years old then and didn’t have a care in the world.

Ten hours after getting to destination, I found out my daughter’s bus was one of the few to have been overtaken by a fast spread. From that moment until now, nearly a year and a half later, I’d become a different man. I was no longer willing or able to do my, honorable part in the restoration, as the slogans and posters everywhere drilled. What good was restoration when you had nothing left to live for?

I’d been trekking in a ping pong type fashion to the Southwest for the past 17 months in an attempt to find her. She’d survived the bus accident, made it to a nearby safe zone, and had been getting transferred to different safe zones ever since. Luckily she’d left me notes confirming where she was being sent to in each safe zone to my relief.

I tracked her all the way to her last note in Colorado 2 months ago. She said she’d found a group of people who planned to escape the confines of the safe zone to search for their loved ones. I was only a few weeks behind her now from the date on the note, which was the closest I’d been in over a year. I picked up the pace barely stopping to rest, let alone sleep. I didn’t want to miss her again and felt a particular kind of dread at the thought of her possibly travelling through dead zones that were infested with the unsatisfied.

*

When the reports of the dead coming back to take the lives of the living began to sound off, the idea seemed so ludicrous that I ignored them entirely. Even when major news outlets began to pick up steam with these reports and their connection with the then recent Genesis Space Shuttle Crash, I pretended the whole thing was a news hoax. How could the same Genesis Space Shuttle that the whole world watched take seven astronauts into space two years ago be found demolished in the tropics of the Congo without anyone noticing? They’d been about to land on the new planet that was discovered, so there was no possible way for them to have come all the way back and crash without warning. When you added that mystery to the stories of dead people, it was just too much for my analytical brain. I dismissed people as gullible when they believed the new planet had just been Earth’s parallel – it’s “other side” – ripped open by the shuttle’s endeavors that now allowed both worlds to exist in the same time and space.

So much time was wasted on my denial right down to the moment when I watched Teresa’s deceased father take her life with a single touch. He’d run right into her childhood home looking like he hadn’t aged a day passed the last photos taken of him nearly 2 decades ago at the time. He’d been abusive to them both, my wife and her mother, all the way up until the day he wrapped his car around a tree while under the influence. Now he stood a blubbering mess as he begged Teresa’s mother to take him back, unaware that he’d been dead for the past 20 years.

That was the thing about the unsatisfied. They never knew they were dead. They returned to live out random moments of their lives that left them unsatisfied on a continuous loop. They tended to appear in places that had been familiar to them while living, which made their loved ones the most at risk. Trying to subdue them was impossible as you were likely to drop dead in less than 10 minutes in their presence or immediately with physical contact due to their lethal energy. Communicating with them was futile as they were at mercy of their memory scene like actors to a script.

Waking up to realize I failed my wife without even putting up a fight was something that festered in me to this day. When I was finally allowed to return home just as all state borders locked down for good, all I had was my wife’s locket in hand as a reminder of my inadequacy. I made a promise right then and there not to let the same happen to my daughter. It was the fuel of that very awful past time that kept me going now. No matter how exhausted or near death I came, I wouldn’t stop until my little girl was back in my arms.

*

I encountered the unsatisfied on four different occasions within the next three days that had nearly left me for dead. There wasn’t much warning before they showed up other than the acute disorientation and the feeling of your body quickly shutting down. That’s why when I ran right into him, I nearly suspected to die instantly. He stumbled back seemingly with the same idea of imminent death as he touched at his body to assure he was still alive.

He was a young guy, probably a little older than Talisa. Relief washed over the both of us as we realized we were both alive. We were standing at the entrance of a long and ill lit highway tunnel. I normally didn’t trust the living I met on the road, but I’d gotten lost, so I opted to engage him. He seemed a good guy – asking if I was okay and offering to share his water with me. I gladly accepted having lost mine.

He led me just a short way inside the tunnel where a few tents were set up. I could tell this was a temporary campsite for him and maybe a few others who weren’t there at the moment. Now, underneath the rays of some of the working tunnel lights, I could see him better. It was the amount of blood that had dried all over his clothes that struck me. He didn’t seem injured, so I knew the blood belonged to someone else. In the instant I saw that familiar gleam across his neck when he turned to hand me the water, I felt all the life drain out of my body.

He noticed the change in my face but didn’t back away until I asked him where they hell he’d gotten that locket. It was the very same one my wife wore nearly every day I’d known her and the very same one I’d given to my daughter who wore it every day thereafter. She would never have taken it off, let alone give it away. His entire demeanor changed then from ‘good guy’ to ‘defensive suspect’ to reveal his true nature.

“…Don’t worry about it. It belongs to me.”

Those were the last audible words he spoke before I found myself throwing him to the ground and beating him with whatever blunt object my hands had found down there with us. I didn’t stop until the only sounds were coming from my cries of rage. When he was still and silent, I ripped the blood-soaked locket off his neck and allowed myself to roll off of him into a fetal position of agony.

I failed her.

I failed my daughter.

Failed to protect her just like I had failed to protect my wife.

My only reasons to live were both gone yet, here I was covered in someone else’s blood as if that made up for anything. I couldn’t go on now – I wouldn’t. I needed to end this reality as soon as possible. With that thought, I attempted to stand. That’s when I felt a different kind of pain in my chest for the first time. I’d been stabbed and multiple times at that. He’d been stabbing me with a pocketknife he must have had on him, and he’d gotten me good. I was only grateful for this. I’d be dead soon and this would all be over.

I gimped my way out of the tunnel so that I could die in open air. I thought myself blessed when I heard my daughter’s voice in my ears so quickly. I let myself fall to the ground where the darkness began to seep into the peripherals of my eyes. When I felt hands grab me and more voices, I opened my eyes to the sight of my daughter. She was leaning over me, screaming for the others with her to help.

“Ta-Tali?” I managed to utter. Was this what death was like?

“YES!!! Yes, it’s me Dad! Oh my God, what happened to you?!! Please help him, please!!!” I could hear her saying. Someone with her checked my injuries and though I couldn’t hear them I knew they must have told her I was a goner with how her cries accelerated.

She was alive. Thank God, she was alive. I hadn’t failed her. I knew somewhere in the corners of my dying mind that this meant I’d murdered an innocent person, but all I managed to absorb was that my daughter was alive. She asked me to open my eyes just a little longer, so I did.

She had a baby in her arms. A tiny little thing that looked just like her when she was a baby. She told me it was her baby. That she’d met a guy at one of the safe zones she’d been to…they’d fallen in love…

…he protected her this whole time…

…a good guy…

Her words faded in and out of my dying senses, still my stomach twisted in knots. I struggled then to speak the speechless out of myself. Only blood and gasps came out as I stared up at my daughter in horror. I looked down at the locket still in my hands. Her eyes followed until the horror had caught her too. What had I done?

I could feel myself fighting desperately to float back up. To open my eyes at another start and another chance. Past the heavy and the dread. She was all I had left in the world, and I would not let her down if it was the last thing I did.