by Justin Clay
“Well, at least we know what we’re having for dinner tonight,” Lena says casually as she lifts the animal and removes the arrow, cleaning the tip against her pants. “I used to hate killing like this…But then you get hungry enough —”
“Lena,” Eli says lowly, and she turns to him a bit confused. His stare is piercing and her eyes widen; she looks to June, in shock, and then to me. “Kids…I think it’s best if we keep going.”
“What’s going on?” I ask, baffled.
“The animals are fleeing.”
“Fleeing? From what?”
“No time to — ”
Before Eli could finish, a blood-curdling woman’s scream stings the air, and from the sound of it, she’s not too far away. I know that sort of scream; it’s the scream of the dying. Of seeing the ones you love dying. Or worse…being murdered by Infected. Being torn away, ripped from your arms — eaten alive, overwhelmed and devoured right in front of your eyes.
I look to Lena, mortified.
“We need to go,” Eli says with finality to all of us. There is no sympathy in his eyes. “Now.”
5
THE MOUNTAINS
Dear you,
You who are reading this letter. You who have survived this far. I want to first thank you for finding this letter. Thank you for reading this letter to know I lived. That I tried to do something in this world. That I tried to live and make a change. But I have failed. No one is left alive. Everyone has died. Mom. Dad. My brother, Terrance, my sister Claire, even my poor dog Bramby didn’t make it…I failed them all. I tried to go find supplies, tried to go find help but everything has gone to shit. Everywhere you turn nothing is like it was. Everything has changed. People have changed. I have changed. I used to think there was something better out there for us, that this life here — This God-awful terrible life here wouldn’t be it. But I’m afraid it is. Hope has mocked us all.
I tried to find you, Derek. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said what I said to you. If I had known that would be the last time I would see you, things would have been different. But I guess we never really know, until it does happen. God, I am so sorry. I love you Derek. Your family didn’t deserve what happened to them. Nobody on this fucking planet deserves an end like this, but I guess someone else thought differently.
But you, who are reading this, don’t be like me. Don’t fail like I did. Don’t give up like I have. You got to keep going. We can’t let our race end like this…No…We got to keep living. Keep surviving. But I cannot anymore…I have tried for so long…But all the food is gone now. I’m too tired to keep on looking…I’m sorry. I don’t want to die a long, painful death of starvation. But I guess that’s what it’s finally come to.
I wish things didn’t end up like this. Derek, if you are somehow reading this…I love you. I love you so much and I fought so hard to find you, but I never did. I hope you found safety. I hope you found that better off somewhere that people keep on talking about just because it gives them something to live for. I waited for you to return. Four years I waited, hoping I’d see your ugly face again but I never did. I fucking hate you for that. This is it for me.
Goodbye,
Sincerely Randel
P.S. If you’re wondering if I ever did wear that shirt you left me, I didn’t but I still have the damn thing.
That was what was written on the front and back of the sheet of paper I found crumpled up at the feet of who was I guess Randel. His suicide letter. I found it, and now I know this person existed and died. Now I know what this cruel world did to him.
I don’t blame Randel for what he did. No one would blame him. So many people have escaped that way…but have they really escaped? I don’t know.
I wish I could believe in a happy ending again. Maybe I did once. But not anymore. There are no more happy endings. I want there to one for June’s sake. But will she leave this broken and dangerous world unscathed? No one is safe.
No one…like the young woman we found scrambling on her hands and knees covered in blood, bitten along the neck, begging for help, for someone to save her and her family that had wrecked their car at the side of the road below. She was the one who had screamed; that’s when I suppose she was attacked and bitten. She had been able to break free from the Infected but only because they were feasting. But she didn’t survive. She died while talking to us, blood spurting out of her mouth, and June watched it all. What else could we do?
Eli had decided to try and assist them; help them, because they might be able to help us — but nothing happened like that. The girl died. And that was that. We left her there. To rot. We left her there, and I have thought about that girl — who could have easily been June or me or anyone — and Randel since then. They have stayed with me as everyone else has. Haunting me. Reminding me that they lived and died. Reminding me that it could be my corpse rotting on the side of the road instead of theirs. And that’s what keeps me up at night. Among everything else.
I should remember them regardless. They lived. And they died. They deserve at least that much. To be remembered, even if only for a little while. I would want that if it had been me. Sometimes I wish it would be. I know I shouldn’t for June’s sake, but I do. Sometimes.
...
A day has passed since that event. No Frothers have been spotted, thankfully. Maybe being deeper into mountains has something to do with it.
It’s growing colder as we climb; Eli seems to be avoiding any rigorous paths fording about the largest mountains. We have remained mainly in the foothills, moving along, ever watchful, sticking to the wider, less treacherous trails. I make sure to have June in my sights all the time as she walks in front of me. Lena walks behind me, and Eli in the front. That’s the way it’s been and that’s the way I imagine it will be from now on, until we reach wherever we’re going.
“Montana.” To the mysterious friend of Eli’s. Lena still hasn’t told me for what. Why they’re risking all of this. But I don’t care. I haven’t asked, and I won’t. I don’t like talking much anymore. I’m too caught up in my thoughts nowadays.
Maybe, I’m becoming like Eli. God, I hope not. He’s a nice enough man, but I don’t ever want to be distant. Maybe I already am and I just cannot see it.
It’s twilight again, and we’re all sitting around at the camp we have made in the middle of the mountainous woods. I don’t know where the hell we are anymore. We could still be in Colorado, for all I know.
Eli doesn’t say anything. In fact, none of us are talking. We’re all wrapped up in our own little worlds, until something happens. Like it always does. Peace, or rather its illusion, doesn’t last long. I don’t expect it to anymore.
“Do you smell that?” Lena asks, her facial expression concerned.
Eli perks up, his eyes narrowing. He sniffs. “Smells like smoke…Must be a fire somewhere.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know,” Eli says, standing to his feet, while slinging on his backpack. He loads his shotgun. “But I’m going to find out; you three stay here…I’ll be back.”
Famous last words, I think.
“Eli — ” Lena says heatedly.
He gives her a look that says, “I need you to stay here, and watch them.”
She frowns, and returns an expression of: “Fine, but be careful.”
Eli vanishes into the green thicket.
Time passes slowly, and after what I feel like is at least fifteen minutes, Eli is still gone. Where could he be? Lena doesn’t worry though; she remains as she’s been, back pressed up against a tree, holding her crossbow, her eyes attentive and sweeping our surroundings. We hear powerful bangs — gunshots — erupt from a distance. Is it Eli?
Silence filters in, and I swallow hard. I notice my hand is trembling. I try to stop it.
Not too long after we hear the gunshots, there’s a distinct rustle within a patch of nearby bushes. Sticks snap, and Lena has directed her crossbow, prepared to fire; I hover my hand over the handle of my pistol, wait
ing too.
Eli rushes out, breathing heavily. He has blood on his shirt, smeared and splattered. He doesn’t seem injured, though. What had happened?
“Eli! What’s going on? You’re bleeding,” Lena says, emotional, as she stands up.
“It’s not my blood,” Eli says roughly. He looks to us, his gaze piercing. “Gather your things, we’re leaving now…I will explain on the way.”
...
We are being hunted. Not the prettiest of news, but from what Eli said he narrowly escaped from a band of Scavengers — crazed, bloodthirsty nomads who kill and loot without so much as a second thought of it. They differ from Ravagers as they don’t necessarily eat people, and are constantly on the move; Ravagers tend to keep to one city. But essentially they’re the same in my book. Just as deadly, and just as unpredictable.
The blood on his shirt belonged to one of them, who is now most likely dead. So our urgency to keep moving no matter what is as apparent as necessary. Eli had scooped up June, carrying her as he sprinted. She definitely wouldn’t have been able to keep up otherwise. And it is all I could do to keep up, despite being quick. I am not familiar with this mountainous terrain, steep trenches, undulating roots, and rocky cliffs. I had clearly heard the Scavengers coming after us: their footsteps, the sounds of weaponry, distant shouting. But thankfully, it was all soon lost. We had traversed through a stream for a while in order to confuse our trail even more.
Eli had said the only reason he had managed to go unseen for as long as he did was that the small group of around five or six had already wiped out a camp and the poor people living there, rummaging through their belongings, not finding much. They had been interrogating a lone woman who was most likely severely distraught, and because of it, incoherent. They had shot her multiple times realizing she couldn’t give them anything they were looking for. The bastards. That was the gunfire we had heard. That’s when one of them spotted Eli; he knifed the guy; blood was spilled, and he ran back to us.
And here we are. But now, we’re no longer running. We ran for a good two miles before slowing down and stopping. We’re catching our breaths, now resting in a narrow nook of a cavern within one of the nearby-forested mountains. The path to get here became exceedingly precarious, as we eventually were forced to move only with our backs pressed against the mountainside, a sheer twenty-foot drop below us into a vast sea of rocky greenery. I think I had lost my stomach back there along with a certain amount of urine.
The air up here is much cooler, and the evening falling on us only makes the atmosphere colder, and the moaning winds bitterer. From where we are sitting around, the sounds of the wind are similar to that of a woman wailing, weeping from some terrible loss. Occasionally high-pitched whispering through the tiny cracks in the stone, deep and sinister in the echoes through the darkness beyond. We can’t build a fire. It would be too noticeable. So we have to make do…as we always do.
Eli is lying flat on his back, his eyes closed. His shotgun is resting on his chest, which slowly rises and falls. Lena remains the ever-vigilant sentinel of the group, her crossbow in hand as she stands at the cavern’s mouth, watching silently for followers. The vantage point from where we are is surprisingly helpful; we can see wildlife drifting far below, with them hardly noticing us in the shadows.
I am watching June curled up below me, her head cradled in the dip of my lap, where I have my legs crossed as I sit. She’s sleeping and I’m softly running a couple fingers through her hair. I start thinking of mom, dad, and our past life…Others…And all at once, I’m overwhelmed.
Tears come, and I have to force them down. But my eyes remain watery. So much has happened in these few desperate years. Too much for any fragile girl like June to endure. But she has endured…She is still alive despite not having a single mean bone in her body.
I hope that will last. Life now requires immediate action over rationality. Not always the best method, or most moral one — but June still defies that insane logic. She has lived on despite it all, and I will make sure she continues to do that. Or die trying.
At the first light of dawn, we continue our journey further into the mountains. Our meandering path through the least treacherous of the Rockies has become more harrowing. The climbs are much higher and longer; the air that hangs about us grows thinner, and the cover of trees sparser. The trees that forest the highlands here are mighty, and some are thick as the length of a small car, but they grow in outcroppings. We’re left pretty much exposed for a great deal now, and that worries me.
There haven’t been any sightings of the Infected yet, which is promising. But I’m not terribly concerned with the Infected, so much as the non-Infected. Those kinds of people can be even worse. The Infected are predictable. Travel in herds most of the time. Keep to darker areas, and main highways. They are predictably unstable. It’s the ones with working brains that you have to worry about more often. Frothers can’t stab you in the back — both figuratively and literally. They don’t have the dexterity capable of doing that. Apparently all of that ability is lost in the process of becoming one of them. Frothers can’t lie. They are what they are.
I know this all too well. I don’t like dwelling on the past, on sticky situations June and I narrowly escaped from. But they come back, like cold winds through the leaves of trees. They come back like they do here and rattle me, when I least want them to…
I shake my head, closing my eyes for a moment and press on. June asks me if I’m all right. I lie and tell her I am.
Stay strong, Rian, I tell myself. Stay strong.
I feel like June and I are just bad luck for anyone who befriends us. We’re an invitation to death. Every person we have been with up until now has died either protecting us, or was murdered by Scavengers, Ravagers and Infected. So it makes me wonder how long it will be before Eli and Lena leave us, too. Every time I get close to whoever it is and finally let my walls down in order to not get hurt as badly, they disappear. Whether through certain death, or other worse means, they vanish. I hate it. I guess that’s why I have kept my distance from them as much as I have. I’m tired of beginning to love someone, only to have them ripped from June and I without so much as a warning. You can only take so much, you know.
“You’ve been much quieter than usual,” Lena observes as we’re walking through the mountainous woods at twilight. The air is thick with the perfume of abundant undergrowth and wildlife here. She keeps her crossbow aimed steadily here and there as she looks around cautiously, but she keeps straying her eyes to me in concern.
“Oh,” is all I can manage to say. It’s pathetic, I know. But for now, it’s all I got.
Lena opens her mouth as if to say something, but she stops when Eli halts, holding up an arm for us to be quiet. Somewhere far in the distance, the howl of a wolf echoes, and my skin shivers.
I swallow. Was that what he stopped us for? I look to Lena, who has her eyes narrowed; she glances to Eli, who looks out behind us.
“What’s going — ”
“Shh,” Eli says to me. He pauses. “They’re here.”
6
SURVIVORS
IF SOMEONE BEFORE THE outbreak had told me I would be struggling to survive as I travel across a wasteland of a country, I would have laughed.
Such situations would never exist, obviously. Couldn’t exist. That ridiculousness is kept for comics and blockbuster movies for the masses to consume eagerly. No one ever counted on it actually happening. Well, maybe aside from the few loonies with self-prepared bunkers — who are probably now still living because of that — no one counted on this. And why would they? Shit likes this doesn’t happen. Shouldn’t happen.
But when it did, the disbelief had been astounding. The shock overwhelming. The aftereffects disastrous. News channels went haywire; reporters lost it on screen consumed by screaming mobs of folks running, shrieking trying to escape from onslaughts of Infected. The Frother count just grew wildly, reaching upwards of hundreds of thousands before the entirety of
modern media went down. And there was no cure in sight. No stopping this relentless abominable wrecking ball. No time for bereavement. No time to do anything except keep moving. Keep surviving.
But, unfortunately, people try to survive in different ways. Such as the Scavengers...
June and I have had our fair share of surviving Scavenger assaults. We know all too well how they operate; they are as cruel and ruthless as this world. So when Eli says to us “they’re here,” that is who I immediately think of, and I reach for my bow, drawing out an arrow. Eli raises his shotgun, and Lena follows his movements. He narrows his eyes, and I can see leathery crinkles appear when he frowns.
