by Tracey Ward
“How are we gonna find Ali?” I whisper back. I make a conscious effort to keep my gun pointed at the ground and nowhere near him. I’m not comfortable enough with this thing to be sure I won’t cap him by mistake.
“Well, I imagine she got out of sight which means she had to go down the road quite a ways.” Syd looks back at me briefly, his eyes alight, a true grin on his face. He’s loving this. “Good thing you like to run, huh?”
And run we do, for miles. We’re outside the city by the time we see the familiar sight of the RV front end creeping out from behind a thick of trees. We’ve pick up the pace and are sprinting toward it when we’re cut off. A small group of infected, I count six, comes bumbling out from behind the house to our right. Syd swears and falls back a few steps, bumping into me as he raises his gun.
He takes out the first one with a shot dead between the eyes. I take note of his skillful aim for future reference because, oh yeah, it matters to me.
As Syd lines up his next shot, I pull my bat out of the strap on my back. Taking quick strides and keeping to the right of the group, never letting any of them on my right side, I begin swinging. I crack my bat into the teeth of a woman, knocking her jaw loose until it swings awkwardly from her face. I take another swing that connects near her eye, hitting close enough to the temple to take her down. Syd unloads a bullet in the skull of another guy, dropping our count of worries to three.
An infected man toward the back of the group suddenly drops to the ground. As I take a swing at the next guy closest to me, I catch a glimpse of an arrow lodged in the back of the fallen man’s neck. Alissa has damaged his spinal cord. I don’t know if that has destroyed the brain and killed him for the second and final time, but I do know he can’t control his body anymore. I guess it doesn’t really matter. If he’s not truly dead, he’s as good as.
I clock this new guy in the ear, spinning him around until he trips over his own feet and collapses. The last standing zombie treads right over him, reaching and moaning for me. I see Syd advance behind her. He uses the butt of his gun to smash her temple while Alissa pops an arrow in her eye, the arrow whipping by near my shoulder and making my heart shudder to a near stop in my body.
One left. The guy on the ground.
My shoulder is aching from the exertion and I worry I’ll tear my stitches again.
“Want me to get him?” Syd asks.
I step away, shaking out my aching. “Be my guest.”
Syd fires a round in the head. I make sure I’m already on my way toward the RV when he does it. I don’t look back.
“Your bat is broken,” Alissa calls to me.
I lift it to inspect it and instantly want to scream out a tirade of curses. It’s badly warped, meaning it’s only a matter of time before it’s utterly useless. In fairness, it’s seen me through some hard times. It’s been doing an admirable job of saving my skin and I would like to thank every disgruntled, zombie worker at the Easton bat plant for their efforts in bringing me a better death stick. However, I’m now boned. My shoulder was crap anyway, but now my weapon of choice is finished. I could get another one but I really wonder if I wouldn’t be better off with something… better.
I sigh deeply as I look at the silver darling one last time, then I cast it to the side of the road.
“Goodbye, old friend.”
“What are you going to use now?” Alissa asks, scooting over to make room for Syd to take over driving.
I climb inside the RV and collapse on my back on the floor feeling sweaty, dirty and spent. “I don’t know.”
“You could learn to use a gun.”
“I think I need to anyway. I’d feel better still having a melee weapon, though.”
“We might have to do more looting,” she warns, grinning at me. “In a building surrounded by walls.”
“Ughhh,” I groan unhappily.
I hear her chuckle from up front as I close my eyes. I toss my arm over my face, feel the RV bump back onto the road from Alissa’s hiding place. Then we’re off, heading into the mountains and the unknown. Eventually we’ll hit the wall because it’s out there. Of that we can be sure, and that’s okay. I don’t fear the end of the quarantine. It’s everything that lies between here and there that has me worried.
Chapter Eleven
It’s been three weeks. Three weeks of searching for the right one and still no luck. I’m lost without my bat. I feel like I should have kept it, warped and broken or no. I’ve considered picking up another one somewhere but all the good ones are taken. Nothing left but wood that will leave me high and dry after just a few hits. It’s time to start expanding my search.
I gave a hammer a try but the reach isn’t there. I tried a tire iron, but it’s heavier than my bat was and my shoulder suffered for it. Plus, I couldn’t find a rhythm swinging it. I’m working with a crow bar now which is nice, but the handle area is lacking. I tried wrapping it with batting tape thinking maybe that would feel at home and familiar but it was a sorry second to what I’m used to. I have a hatchet too, something that’s a little unwieldy and only good for close contact, but I came across it in a hardware store when I was cornered by an infected. It was the first thing I was able to grab, and while it made an unholy awful, gory mess of the thing coming at me, it did shut him down. Now I keep it almost as a good luck charm. It saved me that day and maybe it will again. Both weapons feel like a lot of work, but for now they’ll have to do.
Luckily I’m learning to shoot a gun, though the threat of running out of bullets leaves me cold inside. Alissa has tried to teach me more about shooting a bow but I don’t have the hands for it, I guess. I can’t get the tension right, the aim down. Something’s wrong with how I’m doing it and we both seem pretty annoyed trying to find out what it is.
In fact, everyone seems annoyed with everything. It was only a matter of time. We’re sleeping in shifts and working through a schedule that’s proving pretty brutal. You sleep for 8 hours, stand guard for 8, then you have 8 off but it’s not really off because you’re in charge of either cleaning, cooking, hunting or fishing. We found a good spot high up in the mountains near a lake with a small rushing river but sitting guard on top of the RV, you can’t help but notice how exposed we are. 360 degrees of vulnerability and it’s your job to watch every last degree of it. It’s stressful and incredibly high pressure, something that is getting to all of us. Particularly Alissa.
I hear it from Syd when she starts taking twice her dosage. The regular amount isn’t cutting it anymore, not with the world we’re living in. We have a pretty good talk about what we can do to help her but despite our unusual civility toward each other, we come up dry. Everyone is doing all they can and pretty soon the extra pills Alissa is taking are going to suck her stash dry. At this rate, she has two more weeks then it’s cold turkey. It’s a scary notion and added stress having that ticking clock over our heads. That clock is going to run out and so far it seems there’s nothing we can do about it.
We’ve been back in town to loot a couple of times. We make sure to hit up towns big enough to have a pharmacy or two, but so far no luck. They’ve been completely cleaned out. Not even a cough drop to be found. Drugs are a higher currency than tobacco and caffeine and judging by the bareness of the shelves, someone out there is unbelievably flush at the moment.
“Alissa, wake up. You’re on,” I tell her, shaking her awake. Or at least trying to.
She groans incoherently.
“Hey,” I say, poking at her.
She slaps my hand hard, eyes still closed. She has great reflexes, I’ll give her that. I’m convinced she could kill in her sleep.
“Time to get up, princess.”
“Piss off,” she mumbles.
I laugh, surprising myself a little. I haven’t done that in days.
“Ali, come on,” I say more firmly.
“Ugh, alright.”
She moans and groans some more as she sits up with bleary eyes. She’s not a morning person. Neither is her dad which makes thi
ngs so much fun for me every day. I end each shift getting cursed at, sometimes dodging projectiles being thrown at me, all in the name of keeping the system. If I had Alissa’s Taser, that’s how she’d be waking up. Watch her throw a bowl at my head again and see if I wouldn’t do it.
“How are you feeling?” I ask her. “You doing okay?”
“Yeah, why?”
“You’re harder to wake up now than you were on the road. Should I be worried?”
She scowls at me, her dark hair a crazy mess on her head. “Would you be if I told you yes?”
I meet her scowl with a frown. “Of course I would be. Is that a yes? I should be worried?”
“No. It’s fine. I’m fine,” she mumbles, her tone softening as she scrubs her hands over her face.
I hand her a cup of fresh coffee, a trick I’ve learned for taming the beast. Nothing helps with Syd, he’s always a bear, which is why I’m glad Alissa is his alarm clock and not me.
“Thank you,” she gushes earnestly, hugging the warm mug with her hands.
My scowl fades. “You’re welcome.”
“And don’t worry. It’s nothing bad.”
I lean back on the counter to study her. “Then what is it?”
“It’s the meds,” she answers with a grimace. “Doubling down sometimes makes me sleepy. But I have to do it.”
“Otherwise you’ll see things?”
She nods reluctantly. “Hear ‘em too. It’s awful, especially when I’m on guard.”
“We could take you off rotation, let you slow down on the drugs.”
“No, no, no. No way,” she says firmly, waving her hand at me. “You guys can’t pull 12 hour shifts on guard. It’s pushing it having us doing 8 hours a piece. It’s draining enough as it is and if you guys have to do it more, we’ll all start hearing and seeing things that aren’t there.”
I know she’s right. Syd and I talked about this too. Things are hard enough. But her pills are disappearing and we all know it’s a problem, one we need to solve sooner rather than later.
“He wants to move,” she whispers suddenly.
I snap my eyes to her face, surprised. “Syd does?”
“Yeah. Because of me. He thinks we need to find other people to team up with. Get shorter shifts, get more rest, maybe even a full day off now and then.”
“It’s a bad idea.”
“I don’t know,” she teases with a grin. “A day off sounds good to me.”
“You know why it’s a bad idea,” I remind her seriously.
“I know why you think it is.”
I chuckle darkly. “Siding with Syd. Shocking.”
“When did I ever side with you on this?” she asks, sounding annoyed.
“Corvallis.”
“Oh come on.” She stands, dropping her nearly full mug in the sink. “We all knew Corvallis was a death trap.”
“You agreed we had to leave the sporting goods store when the truckers showed up.”
“Because there was a threat.”
“And you think there won’t be with another group? Bigger groups mean bigger supplies and more resources. Smaller more savage packs of people will kill for those resources. You want to be part of that?”
“And you think that if we’re found out here in the woods with all these supplies that we wouldn’t be at risk in exactly the same way?”
“I know we would, which is why we lay low like we do. It’s why we’re careful to never let anyone know where we are. People wouldn’t hesitate to kill us for what we have.”
“Then we should be in a bigger group that can defend itself.”
“You mean a bigger target.”
She rolls her eyes before pushing past me. “Whatever, never mind.”
“You know what I’m loving about all of this, Ali?” I snap at her, watching her sift through her clothes and try to ignore me. “Being outvoted every single time, without fail. Doesn’t matter what the issue is. Last week it was toilet paper brands. You are terrified to back my play against him.”
She glares at me over her shoulder. “You want me to back you up? Side with you against my dad? Fine! I will.” She shakes her head in frustration and mutters, “Whatever keeps the peace around here.”
“And that’s just it. You’re doing whatever it takes to keep the peace but in case you hadn’t noticed, the world is ending. People are eating each other alive. What peace do you think you’re going to keep?”
“So we should add to the chaos? Lose all humanity and go crazy?”
“No, I don’t want you to go crazy and I don’t want you to side with me against your dad, not all the time. Maybe just when you know I’m right. How ‘bout that?”
“I do.”
“Like. Hell. You know what? You guys seem to have this all figured out and squared away. That’s great. I’ll back out and let you do your thing. You don’t need me anymore, you’ve got daddy to take care of you, right?”
“Daddy?” she asks angrily. “Are you serious right now? What’s wrong with you?”
“Nothing is wrong with me,” I fire back. I know it’s a lie as I say it. I can taste the sheer bitterness of it on my tongue as it rolls out of my mouth. “I don’t know,” I groan, shaking my head. “I don’t friggin’ know.”
“Jordan,” Alissa says, her voice softening.
That tenderness, that thing I normally love about her, it pisses me off.
“No, just… shut up,” I say, low and stupid. And cruel. When did I get cruel?
She flinches. I feel awful but I can’t take it back. Honestly, I don’t even want to. I meant it. I want her to shut up. I want Syd to shut up. I want the zombies and the crickets and the birds to shut the hell up. I want to be able to shut up, to not talk to anyone about anything for five minutes. How much is it to ask for just a few minutes of deep, blissful, ignorant silence?
“I—fu— I need some air,” I stammer, looking anywhere but at her.
She doesn’t say anything as I burst out of the RV. When I look over my shoulder she hasn’t moved. She’s standing there beside the sink, staring into nothing with her back to me like I was never there.
As I come crashing out, Syd doesn’t look up from the fire, though I know he’s heard everything. He knows there’s trouble in paradise but it’s not his business, not now. Not anymore. He had opinions bursting out his butt just days ago but now that we’re on the decline, he could care less.
I take a walk around the campsite. I have to go in a wide circle where both of them can hear me walking because we all agreed to never leave the area without each other. Can you imagine how much that has contributed to the tension in this place? You can’t take a piss without having someone hear it. I farted yesterday and Alissa told me, ‘Bless you’, like I’d sneezed. We’re all so turned around and absorbed in each other’s everything that it’s getting disturbing. I feel like a caged animal but really, what’s the alternative? Go it alone? Agree to join with a larger group? I’ll die either way and as much as I wonder about how truly alive any of us actually are (this thing we’re doing is not living) I don’t especially care to die.
Not even when I dream of Beth. Not really. Mostly in those situations I just wish she was alive. I wish I didn’t have to see her rotting out and fading away, looking less and less like my sister every time I dream of her. Sometimes she’s not even wearing her clothes anymore. She’s wearing things I’ve seen on zombies around town when we’re looting. I changed her red hair to blond once. One time it was even long and flowing, the dark color nearly ebony. When I woke that morning and saw Alissa, her hair long, down and so, so dark, I grabbed her in a tight hug. I was just so happy to see her alive.
I avoid her after the fight. Not because I’m a coward but because I don’t want to fight anymore. I wait until I know she’s on guard before heading inside the RV, my head bent low so I don’t see her, then I go to sleep. When Syd shakes me roughly awake without a single word, I sigh with relief. I was expecting some kind of Sydly advice about how to
handle the situation with Alissa, something that would of course end in my apologizing for being so incredibly wrong in every way. I’m not sure I’m not wrong, but I’m definitely not sure I am either.
I grab a Pop Tart packet and head for the roof quickly, ready to get this confrontation over with. But when I get there she’s gone. It’s weird and dangerous but I choose not to care. Instead, I settle in and wait for the long night to start. I can hear muffled talking from inside the RV, see the light from candles glowing warmly through the windows, casting yellow squares on the dirt below me. I hear some chuckling, a little bit of laughter that I recognize as Alissa’s, something that makes my heart grow tight, then the lights are extinguished. Syd must be going to sleep which means Alissa is awake for another 8. I wonder what she’ll do with her time. Sometimes she uses a candle to read. Other times she cooks or tries to learn to bake bread, an ashy, horrible decision every time.
“Jordan.”
“Jesus!” I whisper-shout. I know it’s Ali, I recognize her voice, but hearing anybody speak in the dark when you’re supposed to be alone, especially when you’re on zombie watch, will get anyone’s heart right up into their throat.
“Sorry,” she whispers. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”
“What would you do if you meant to scare me? Roll up dressed up as a mime?”
“You’re scared of mimes?”
She comes to sit beside me, her side pressed against mine.
“They’re French and they’re clowns. Yes, I’m scared of mimes.” I glance over my shoulder. “Among other things.”
“Other people you mean?”
“How do you know I’m not talking about zombies?”
“Because I know,” she says confidently. “I know you’re looking out for someone with a heartbeat right now.”
“Yeah,” I grumble, looking at her pointedly. “A heartbeat and a hair-trigger shotgun.”
“I’m surprised you know what a hair-trigger is.”
I frown at her, mildly offended. “Why?”
She shrugs. “You don’t hunt, you don’t like using guns.”
