Haven 3 - A Post-Apocalyptic Harem

by Misty Vixen

  “I know where that is,” Ellie said. “We’ll find him, one way or another, and get him back here promptly.”

  “I do thank you for this. It is genuinely appreciated. Oh, and, his name is Tyler.”

  “I’m glad we could help. We’ll be back soon.”

  “Good luck.”

  They began walking away, back towards the exit.

  …

  “You’re changing, you know that?” Ellie asked.

  They’d hardly said anything as they had walked east, eventually passing the abandoned train station where he and Cait had fought off a pack of rippers in the darkness. He still had fucking nightmares about that, sometimes.

  “What do you mean?” he replied, glancing back briefly at the train station as it disappeared behind another treeline.

  “That was pretty smooth. Pretty diplomatic. You know it’s smarter to keep good relations with them, even at an inconvenience.”

  “We need the food,” David replied.

  “We do. You could have said ‘thanks but no thanks, we’ve got better things to do’. But you didn’t. I would’ve, because I was pissed.”

  “You get too pissed, Ellie,” he murmured.

  “I know. That’s another thing. You actually stood up to me last night about scouting. You genuinely caught me off guard with that. It was impressive.”

  “Well...I need your help. I want your help. And, you know, I want to help you, too. I want to be there when you do stuff like that.”

  “Don’t make the mistake of thinking that I need you, David,” Ellie replied, a little harshly, he thought.

  “I didn’t say that,” he murmured. She didn’t say anything, and after a few moments of feeling a familiar frustration beginning to well up within him, he stopped suddenly. She stopped as well after a few steps, and reluctantly looked back at him. “What’s your problem?” he asked finally, staring into her yellow cat eyes. “What’s your deal, Ellie? Do you like me or not? Do you trust me or not? Do you want to be around me or not?”

  These were questions he’d wanted to ask her, point blank, almost since they’d had their first real interaction. He hadn’t, because they were too direct and probably rude, and also because he was waiting for them to go away.

  Only they hadn’t, because shit like this kept happening.

  “I...do like you, David. I mean, I thought that was obvious. We’ve had sex more than once now and-”

  He cut her off. “And what does that mean? I know you can sleep with people you don’t like, Ellie.”

  “I trust you!” she snapped. “I’ve shared things with you that I haven’t shared with anyone outside of Cait and Jennifer, okay? I like you, I trust you, I want to be around you.”

  “Then why is it like pulling teeth to get you to say that? Why does it seem like you have to punctuate every fifth sentence with something meant to forcibly remind me of the distance between us? I swear we can’t go a day of interaction without you tossing a bucket of ice water over a conversation,” he asked.

  She sighed and looked down for a moment. “It isn’t you, David.”

  “So you do this with Cait? With Jennifer?” he asked.

  She looked up again, like she was going to jump to her defense, then hesitated. “It’s not...the same. With them,” she murmured.

  “So it is different? I’m right, then, yes? I mean, if I’m doing something to piss you off, then tell me to my face. You obviously don’t have a problem with shit like that.”

  “You’re being surprisingly mean, David,” she said, and that was like a bucket of ice water across him. She sounded and looked shockingly vulnerable, and he felt a surge of guilt.

  He sighed softly and pinched the bridge of his nose, massaging it for a moment. “I’m sorry, Ellie...I’m sorry,” he murmured.

  “No, you’re right. I just...wasn’t ready for this. You’re right and you’ve got a right to be frustrated, I suppose. I...don’t really want to get into it. Suffice to say, I like you, and that scares me,” she replied.

  “Why?” he asked, exasperated.

  “I...don’t want to talk about it,” she replied, looking guilty now.

  He stared at her for a moment, and his frustration quickly began to melt away. Now he just felt bad. “Okay,” he said, “that’s...fair. That’s your right. I’m...fuck, I’m sorry I brought this up at all. Let’s just go.”

  “David,” she said, and crossed the distance between them, and put her hands on his shoulders. “I’m not...attacking you. I’m not punishing you. This isn’t a you thing, per say. It’s about you, but honestly, it’s more about me and my problems. And I...need time, to think about if I even want to get into...the whole thing.”

  “All right, I get that,” David replied. “I’m sorry I got upset. And it’s fine, if you don’t want to tell me, it’s really fine, I won’t be angry. I just...wanted things to be...nicer, between us.”

  “They are,” she murmured, and she hugged him. “But I hear you. I will...try.”

  “I appreciate that,” he replied, hugging her back. After a few seconds, he sighed. “We really should be hurrying.”

  “Yes, we should,” she agreed.

  They disengaged and began hurrying off through the woods.

  “So what is this place?” he asked after a few moments.

  “Like William said, an abandoned farm. There’s a farmhouse, a barn, a silo, but that collapsed, and some sheds and fields. I found it a few months back when I was scouting out here. Tried to search it but I was run off.”

  “By what?”

  “Rippers.”

  David didn’t say anything, just felt his stomach go cold as he flashed back to running into that pack of fucking monsters in the train station. Cait had saved his ass. It had been worth it, they’d found a good cache of supplies there, including the submachine gun that he now had with him, slung over his neck. He’d ended up taking it today, though he wasn’t entirely sure why. Just a feeling. Apparently his feeling was correct. The pair of them kept walking until finally they broke through another treeline and came out into a large, snowy clearing where this abandoned farm sat. It looked a lot like the one they’d just come from, only derelict and dead.

  Although, David saw as he studied the area, not too dead. There were footprints in the snow, leading towards the main house. They were steady prints, in a roughly straight line, with boots. Almost certainly not an undead, zombie or any of the newer types. Someone was here, at least. Ellie began making her way forward after a bit.

  “Come on,” she murmured. “Be careful.”

  “Yep,” David replied softly, gripping his SMG and double-checking that the safety was off. They made their way along the center of the snowy field. He spied the broken remains of the silo off to the right, fallen in on itself in a heap of broken rubble. Surrounding them was a wooden fence that looked in surprisingly good condition. It all did, actually, for being abandoned.

  “How long has this place been empty?” he asked quietly, scanning back and forth for any signs of life.

  “Not very long,” Ellie replied. “I don’t know for sure, but from the way people talked about it, maybe a year or two. Not sure what happened to force whoever lived here out.”

  David began to say something, but then they heard a shout and several gunshots coming from the farmhouse. In one of the second story windows, he saw that telltale flashing of muzzle flare. Ellie took off. “That’s our cue!”

  He followed after her, adrenaline flooding his body. Please don’t let it be rippers… he thought miserably. He hated fighting them so much. He thought he saw dark movement somewhere to the right of the house, near the back, but then they were too close to the house and it was out of sight. It had happened so fast he couldn’t be sure if it was a shadow or not. Well, he’d find out one way or another. David followed Ellie as she came up onto the front porch. The front door was cracked open, and apparently she thought there was no need for subtlety, because she kicked it open and aimed her pistol into the r
oom beyond.

  Overhead, more shouting and gunfire.

  “Clear!” Ellie called, and rushed in.

  They moved through a living room full of dusty furniture and into a hallway. Something growled off to their left, and he knew in that instant that yes, they were indeed facing rippers. “Fuck!” he snapped as he saw two of them scrambling in through a smashed-open back door, right into the hallway. He also just caught sight of one scrambling up some stairs right next to them. “Go! Go! I got this!” he yelled as he leveled the SMG at the two coming in.

  Ellie didn’t wait, rushing up the stairs and opening fire.

  David focused on the two monstrous things coming at him, aiming for them. He had to kill them damned quick. The sleek, dark creatures, reps turned into undead, given razor-sharp talons and nasty teeth, advanced on him with shrieking hisses. He unloaded on them, hosing them down with the submachine gun. The first spray of gunfire was the most concentrated, and it caught the closest creature in the chest, neck, and face, splattering the hallway with dark blood and shreds of flesh. The second one ducked and began sprinting for him, and he saw it preparing to leap as he readjusted aim and squeezed the trigger again.

  The volley of red hot lead hit it just in time, splitting its skull and spraying its brains across the walls. It dropped just a few feet from his feet. David let out a sharp breath, preparing to hurry up after Ellie, when another shadow fell across the ground outside the back door. A second later, another ripper came screaming in after him. He fired off the rest of his bullets, depleting the magazine, and cut it down, ending it with two well-placed rounds in whatever it had left for brains. He hastily reloaded, hands shaking slightly, waiting for the next thing to happen.

  Nothing did. He heard another shout and a gunshot from overhead, then silence. He cursed, glancing down at his SMG. He only had the one reload. Letting it hang, he pulled out his pistol and jogged up the stairs.

  “Ellie!?” he called.

  A pause, then, “Here, David! I’m okay, so is the survivor. Help me secure the area!”

  “On it! Coming up!”

  He hurried up the stairs and poked his head into the first room he saw. This was where Ellie and the survivor, a wide-eyed man with trembling hands and a shaved head, stood. The man was panting. David locked eyes with him. “You’re Tyler?”

  The man stared back, getting his breath back, shaking badly. “Y-yeah,” he managed after a few seconds. “Who the fuck are you?”

  “I’m David, she’s Ellie. Mister Thatch sent us to save your ass,” he replied.

  “Oh shit,” Tyler muttered, looking embarrassed.

  “Yeah. Stay right here, don’t move, we’ll be right back.”

  “I...” he hesitated, looking from David to Ellie, who were both, to varying degrees, failing to hide how they felt about this particular situation, and he just nodded, “Yeah, okay.”

  “Good.”

  They left the bedroom he was in and took several minutes first to clear the top floor, finding it all empty, though with several broken windows, and he was pretty sure rippers could climb, then moving down to the first story. They cleared it out, shutting the doors where they could, and returned to Tyler when they were sure they were secure.

  “All right, Tyler,” Ellie said, holstering her pistol and walking over to him, “mind telling us what in the fuck possessed you to come deep into ripper territory, alone and under-equipped?”

  “I, um, I was...” he looked like he was trying to come up with a lie, and after several moments, finally gave up with a sigh, his shoulders slumping. “I was here looking for something. My girlfriend, she lives on the farm with me, she used to live here, with her family, last year. When the place got attacked and they had to run, she lost her ring. Her family ring. Her mom gave it to her, and her grandma gave it to her mom, it’s been in the family for generations. I wanted to, you know, to get it back for her.”

  Ellie let out a loud, irritated sigh, but David felt some sympathy.

  “I can’t leave without it,” Tyler added, some steel coming into his voice.

  “You damn well-” Ellie began, taking a step towards him.

  “Ellie,” David said.

  “What?!” she snapped, turning to look at him.

  “We’re at a prime location, a new location, and it’s not like we’re going to have a good opportunity to come back again. We should search it for supplies.”

  She stared at him a moment longer, arms crossed, tail twitching furiously, then she looked back at Tyler. “Forty five minutes, and then we’re leaving, regardless.”

  “Thank you,” he said. “I’ll get started looking for it. You’ll let me know if you see it?”

  “Yes,” David replied. “What does it look like?”

  “It’s just a simple gold ring.”

  “Get to it,” Ellie said, and walked out of the room. David followed after her as she walked down the stairs.

  “You’re being a little harsh, don’t you think?” he asked as they walked into the kitchen and started searching.

  “No, he’s being more than a little fucking stupid,” she growled, yanking open the first of several cabins and poking around inside. “Comes out here into known ripper-infested land, armed with a goddamned six-shooter, a revolver! Takes fucking forever to reload, fucking idiot. You’re being too soft,” she replied.

  “Weren’t you just telling me last night how happy you are that I’m dating Cait because I’m such a nice person?” he asked, checking the fridge.

  She didn’t say anything, just kept hunting fervently, occasionally yanking something from inside and slamming it down on the countertop.

  “Okay, he went off half-cocked, I get it. It was stupid. But you’ve never done the same thing?” he asked.

  “Oh shut up,” she replied after a minute, and he laughed.

  “Or what?” he asked. “What are you going to do to me, Ellie?”

  She stopped what she was doing, walked over to him, and extended one finger, with a claw out, towards him. She hooked him by his belt with the claw and pulled him towards her, looking into his eyes. “You really want to find out?”

  “Well I do now,” he replied.

  She stared at him with her wild cat eyes for a few seconds longer, then gave him a firm kiss on the mouth. He began to kiss her back, but then she pulled back and gave him a little shove. “You fucking tease!” he snapped as she walked away.

  “Yeah, yeah, quit complaining and get back to work,” she replied.

  “You’re lucky we aren’t alone or I’d bend you the fuck over and punish the fuck out of you,” David said, going back to his search.

  “I’d love to see you try,” she murmured.

  “Oh really?”

  “Really. You’ll have to show me someday.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind.”

  They performed a search of the kitchen, trying to be as thorough as they could in the time available to them. They managed to gather up a dozen cans of food, mostly vegetables, some fruits, and even some spices and seasonings that David was thrilled to slip into his pack. They moved on to a living room, searching beneath the furniture and anywhere else anything might be hidden, all while keeping an eye out the windows. As they finished their search of the living room, which proved fruitless, and moved on to the rest of the ground floor, with him taking a small bathroom and Ellie taking a bedroom, he began to see movement.

  Zombies had wandered in, no doubt drawn in by the firefight. They didn’t seem particularly sure about where the fresh meat was, but they did seem sure that fresh meat was around somewhere close. David kept quiet and opened up a medicine cabinet. He felt his heart leap as he spied, for fucking once in his life, medicine in a goddamned medicine cabinet! It was just a bottle of painkillers and a half-empty bottle of antibiotics, and a few bandages, but that was a huge find as far as he was concerned. Under the sink, he even found some cough syrup and hid it away in his pack, thinking of Ann and her sick child.

  After
making sure nothing else was hidden away, checking the toilet tank and finding nothing, he joined Ellie and helped her. They found some clothes and a small suitcase that they shoved full of clothes, any scraps of cloth they could find, really. Blankets were in short supply, and a few of the people at the campgrounds were good with sewing. And David knew they could always use more clothes. Especially with winter in full bloom and the potential for more people showing up right around the corner.

  Once that was done, they headed upstairs. He had been keeping his eye out for a ring but so far he hadn’t seen anything like that. Ellie headed into the second story bathroom and David moved to where Tyler was.

  “Any luck?” he asked.

  “No, nothing yet. You?” Tyler replied.

  “No ring.”

  “Sorry.”

  He just grunted and kept looking.

  David left him to it, heading to another room that looked like it might once have been a study or an office. Several bookshelves were totally barren. He poked through every drawer in a desk and found nothing. After looking under the desk and in any of the shadowy areas, he headed for the only other door in the room. Opening it up, he found a small closet that was almost totally bare. There was an old jacket inside, the only thing in sight, hanging from a hanger in the center of the closet. There was something oddly specific about it. David turned on his flashlight, checking the shelf overhead and the floor beneath, finding nothing but dust and trash.

  He reached into the pockets of the jacket, found nothing. He pulled the jacket off the hanger. It was a good jacket, at least. He hesitated as he heard something clink inside, something metal. Opening it up, he saw that there was an inner pocket. David reached in and felt his heart skip a beat as he wrapped a fist around several pieces of metal, what felt like jewelry. He pulled out a handful and found half a dozen rings, three mismatched earrings, and a necklace with a gold chain.

  “Oh fuck me,” he whispered. Moving over to the desk, he set it all down, then reached in and pulled out the rest. More earrings, another two rings, and another pair of necklaces. No, not a necklace, one of them was an old pocketwatch with a golden chain. It all looked to be in pretty good condition. David studied them. Jewelry was a curious thing in the new world. Most people would either laugh at the notion of it, or, occasionally, they’d find something that caught their fancy and pay a little bit for it. But there were some who would go out of their way to pay shitloads of supplies and resources for even just a few pieces.