Entombed by Brian Keene Read Free Book Online Page A

head. I turned over, looked at Hannah, and told her it had been a mistake. Then I got dressed while she sat there in the bed, a sheet wrapped around her breasts, staring at me with hurt and confusion. She asked me to stay, and I told her that I couldn’t. I told her we’d talk about it more later, but we never did. I went out of my way to avoid her at work. I stopped taking her phone calls and blocked her email address. Two weeks later, she quit the Pocahontas. I don’t know what happened to her after that. I’d like to think she found someone who treated her the way she deserved, and that she was happy, if even for a brief while before the world ended—but I just don’t know.
    I don’t know what happened to Alyssa either, ultimately. Since becoming trapped in the bunker, I’d tried not to let myself dwell on the possibilities—whether she was still alive somewhere out there, or had instead joined the ranks of the walking dead. In either case, she was gone. Out of reach. In truth, I’d lost her long before the zombies came. Our story was over before this one began. A good friend of mine had told me—shortly after Alyssa and I split up—that divorce was like a death without a corpse, and that I had to grieve and mourn just like I’d have had to do if she’d died.
    Thinking too much about Alyssa’s possible fate only led to more heartbreak and frustration. Late at night, I told myself that she’d escaped. I imagined her somewhere else, maybe in a police station or an Army base or maybe on a boat, out to sea and out of the zombies’ reach. I imagined her happy and alive, and maybe missing me. Somehow, that made my sense of loss much more profound.
     
    ***
     
    I sat there in the incinerator room, overwhelmed with remorse, battered by my guilty conscience and sick to my stomach over everything from the way I’d treated Alyssa to the murder I’d just committed, and wondered again why I even bothered. What was the point in all this? Why keep struggling, trapped beneath a mountain with a bunch of madmen and slowly starving to death? Why not just end it all right now? Just start the incinerator up and climb inside, or poke my head outside and offer myself up as a snack to the zombies. Not that I’d be much of a meal for them, not with all the weight I’d lost.
    I thought about the people we’d lost in the first few days of the siege—folks like Annie Leavell, a very kind, generous and gregarious woman who had worked in one of the Pocahontas’s shops and had passed away from a heart attack on our third day here, and Ryan Burack, a tourist from Wisconsin who’d been staying in the hotel when the shit hit the fan and died our first night in the bunker, passing quietly in his sleep. We never figured out the cause. We hadn’t even known Ryan’s name until we pulled out his wallet after his death. We knew that Annie had a daughter, Chesya, who she’d talked about all the time. It felt wrong, not being able to inform her daughter of her death.
    We’d put Annie and Ryan and all the others into the incinerator, because it was the only way to dispose of their bodies. It had been a solemn, if gruesome task. We’d treated them with respect—offered words of peace and mumbled prayers before we sent them on their way, reducing them to ashes. Had they been the lucky ones? Annie had, quite literally, died laughing. At least she’d gone out relatively happy, despite the circumstances. At least she hadn’t died on an empty stomach. Would I be able to say the same? At that point, it seemed like it would be a lot easier just to give up and give in.
    But I didn’t. I didn’t think about it. I didn’t have to. It was instinct. Pure, primal instinct. When Chuck and the others knocked on the door a moment later, I forgot all about Alyssa and Annie all of the things that had gone wrong in my life, and went right back to doing what I had to do to survive.
     

 
    FOUR
     
     
     
     
    “Pete?”
    I held my breath. My