by Red Lagoe
Barton Road filled with the infected that had busted through the fence from the quarantine zone. They wandered around the lake cottages, on the road, and many skidded down the bank into the water.
John waited over an hour for a safe opportunity to get back up the slope. When the infected dispersed enough, and the sky darkened, he slid his body out of the water and climbed the hill toward the cottage, unsure if he'd ever see Melody again.
Three of the infected had already dropped dead since they had arrived on the bank slope.
In unbearable pain, John took out two of the slow-moving infected on his way back up the hill to the screened porch, then snuck inside without attracting any others.
He peeled the Kevlar vest from his body and inspected the bruising on his chest, on the crow-infested prison wall tattoo.
He could take the canoe, or even the red lightning bolt boat if he could get it to the water, but Melody would likely be on the other side of the lake by then, and he wouldn't be able to track her in the dark. John had no idea how to get to the cabin where Melody was heading.
The sky grew darker, and the moaning of infected outside the lake cottage was enough of a deterrent to keep John from rushing after her blindly.
He took some more Tylenol, and decided he would have to wait until morning to get moving. His chances of finding her were bleak, but he had to come up with something. John picked up the realty guide that Melody had handed him before she left and flipped through the pages, while he tried to devise a plan.
44
Opioid Hike
The next day brought cool, autumn temperatures, and Melody sped toward the marshy outlet that fed into the foothills of the mountains. Occasionally, she would spot the dark silhouette of a figure stumbling along the shoreline, but more often, she saw inanimate bodies on the docks and in the backyards of lake homes.
She pulled the boat into the swampy cove of state-protected wilderness, where there were no inhabitants for miles. She let the boat drift into the thick of the lily pads and calla plants that were growing from the shallow water.
Melody had found half a jar of Skippy in the storage compartment, along with some moldy bread. She popped another pain-killer and stuffed some peanut butter in her mouth with her finger, then shared the sticky treat with Harkness.
The blood on the edge of the boat where Marcus had been grazed with a bullet reminded her of the trauma. Her gut tightened thinking of everything she had been through. Her heart sank, worried about the hard road ahead.
"Be Strong," she said, repeating her father's words, unsure why she followed his advice in the first place.
She walked all day, with her arm bandaged in a makeshift sling and her head within the thick haze of a slight opioid overdose. Harkness followed along.
She crossed the ankle-deep swamp, climbing from each grassy patch of earth to the next to keep her feet out of the black muck. She trekked through the densely wooded foothills that laid between Route 3 and 48, avoiding the nearby small towns.
Melody hiked in a trancelike state, even walking along the pavement of Route 3 for a short time, with the sheer cliff of Mount Mercy on one side and Bald Mountain on the other. She came across more dead bodies than she did the living, but nothing seemed to faze her.
"Here we go," she said to Harkness as they left the road for a dirt ATV trail. "It's a long way up."
Two miles up the trail, they turned onto an even smaller dirt trail, blocked by a cattle gate. It was in one of the pictures taken by the realtor for the ad. Melody had argued that it wasn't even part of her grandfather's land, but the realtor insisted it was a good shot of some rocky prominences that might help the sale. She edged out of her drug-induced fog and realized how close she was to her grandfather's cabin.
Melody's drugs began to wear off, exposing the harsh reality of her pain and loneliness as she marched deeper into the forest. On the third ATV trail she turned onto, the trees changed from the half-naked oak and walnut trees to a dense-packed forest of pine. The trail narrowed and wound up the side of the mountain. Melody hiked upward, in a robotic determined march to get to a destination—unsure why she was even going.
It was silent, except for the sound of pine needles crushing beneath her feet. There were no wandering infected up there. No dead bodies. The air smelled of pine—like Dad had just dragged in a fresh-cut Christmas tree.
Melody paused at the fork in the narrow ATV trail and cut to the right along an overgrown path, nearly obstructed from view by growth.
She climbed the steep hill, but the cozy log cabin didn't come into view until she cleared the fallen branches that had blocked what was going to be the driveway someday.
Melody was home.
The oak trees that surrounded the cabin had shed most of their leaves into a blanketing layer on the front yard. Her heart relaxed as she stepped foot on the front porch. The floorboards beneath her feet creaked. The realtor, in an effort to stage the property as an actual habitable home, had hung a sign above the entrance that read Live, Laugh, Love.
Melody huffed in derision at the sign and the memory of her father.
She wedged open a window and climbed inside.
The cabin was adorned with furnishings that the realtor had towed in by four wheeler, hoping to improve the ambiance. A cozy lightweight leather couch was situated before the fireplace, a rocking chair, and some canisters on the counters. The stone kitchen oven reminded her of her grandfather's venison stew, and it beckoned her to make a fire.
She cleaned herself up first, using the fresh spring water flowing through the manual pump outside, but once she felt settled in for the night, an overwhelming sense of loneliness encompassed her.
She sat down on the deck overlooking the small lake far down the side of the mountain slope.
In her hands, was the wooden Live, Laugh, Love, sign. With the blade that John had given her, she etched the word SURVIVE over the lettering, but she struggled to understand the point in surviving any more.
Life was too hard—it was always hard—and she couldn't think of a good reason to keep fighting like her dad had told her to do.
The daylight faded yet again, and the first stars were shining through the twilight overhead. Melody would have preferred to die in peace—right where she was sitting—and she had the opioids to do it.
45
A Lull in the Storm
Melody sat on the deck of the mountain cabin and held her dad's crumpled note to her chest as if her heart could absorb the words into her soul. The whispering thought of suicide popped in and out of her head, but survival spoke louder.
She was always just surviving and she hadn't lived yet.
She needed to stay alive a little longer and give life a chance, but her dad's words of advice had no clue what the world would become.
The stars of the Summer Triangle were still overhead in the early twilight autumn sky. Melody's eyelids were too heavy and strenuous to lift, but she cranked her neck back and looked to the stars. Vega, Deneb, and Altair were showing off before any other stars could manage to outshine the fading twilight. The sight made her heart float for a moment, defying the weight that crushed it a second earlier. There they were—her stars—her dad's stars. Unwavering in their glow. Her constant through life's storms, always there, behind the clouds, waiting to shine through.
Harkness wiggled beside her on the floor of the deck and rested his jowls in her lap, creeping his paws up next, in a poor attempt to sneak his sixty pound body into her lap.
She let out a laugh and invited him up, and her laugh turned into tears as he licked at her jawline.
There were little things that she would miss if she didn't keep living—like the companionship of a dog and the beauty of the stars. Despite the state of the world, there was still joy to be had.
Whether Fort Drummond would stand long enough to find a vaccine or not, whether mankind fades into non-existence, there would still be stars in the sky and sunlight through the trees.
&nbs
p; Melody ran her fingers along the letters of her Live, Laugh, Love sign, unsure if she was destined for only survival. Or perhaps she needed to find a way to make living worth it, despite the world around her.
Maybe that was her dad's point: that life would be what she made of it. And what about love and laughter? Perhaps she would be destined to experience those with nobody other than Harkness.
"That wouldn't be so bad, would it?" She asked as he snored in her lap and she scratched behind his ear.
Harkness jerked himself upright and growled, looking toward the side railing of the back deck. Melody rushed inside at his warning, and Harkness followed her in.
As she locked the door to the back deck, there was a thump on the front door.
Melody's heart ached with fear and exhaustion, but she was ready to take on whatever was up next.
She tiptoed to the front door.
A voice called from the other side. "Hey Chuck, you really wanted to live way the hell out here?"
At the sound of his voice, Melody's mind and heart twirled in a spiral, like the autumn leaves blowing from the trees, and she rushed to unlock the door.
She opened it to see John, with an overstuffed backpack—prosthetic limb strapped to the side of it, standing on her front porch. He leaned on the old man's walker.
She stared at him with her mouth agape, and Harkness danced in a figure eight between them.
"How?" she asked. "I saw-"
John exposed the top of his Kevlar vest beneath his buttoned shirt, and Melody ran her fingers along the edge of it.
John handed her the Carroll County Realty Guide that Melody placed in his hands the day before. It was folded back to the listing of her grandfather's cabin.
"Page 48 was a pretty good read, just like you said."
Melody threw herself at John in an embrace that could not bring her close enough to him, pinning the old man's walker between their bodies.
"You made it all the way up here with one arm?" John said.
"You made it with one leg..."
"A lot of the infected ones have died. There's a lot of bodies out there. They're all dying..." John shifted his weight on the walker. "That boat with the red lightning bolt. I borrowed it. It didn't take long to get in the water. Then I used maps and this realty guide to find the property. Once I got to the dirt trails, you left a hell of a foot trail to follow. Your footprints look like a drunken pirate stomped up the mountain."
“I took a lot of drugs.”
John shifted his weight again with a wince. "That's why I'm here. You still have those meds?"
"So you're not here for me?" Melody smiled.
"Don't flatter yourself." John walked by her and went inside with a smirk.
Melody treated John's leg and started a fire, and Harkness curled onto the floor near the heat while they relaxed on the couch.
John's softening beard brushed against her pale skin as he inched along her neck. His touch, this time, did not make her uncomfortable or unsure. She wanted nothing more than for him to be doing exactly what he was doing. He wrapped her within his arms and laid her down as the stone fireplace popped and crackled.
"You're not going to punch me this time are you?" he asked, hovering over her body.
"We'll see."
Within the heat of the firelight, their bodies entangled, rocking within each other's embrace, and currents of delectation surged through Melody's veins.
As his chest heaved and the orange light of the flame danced across John's crow tattoo, it created an illusion of the birds flapping their wings—trembling with excitement to take off from the prison wall they had been guarding.
She wished she could stay hidden away in that cabin forever, tucked within the comfort of John's company, but she knew better. Life had never been that easy.
Later that night, Melody sat in the lounge chair on the back porch that hung over the steep slope in the darkness of the night, while John approached with two cups of hot tea.
She took the warm cup within her palms with a smile. "We have tea?"
"It was in a canister in there. There are jars of spaghetti noodles, rice, and some oils with leaves. We can make the little bit of food we have last a few days. Longer if we need to."
She leaned her head on the reclined lounge chair and looked to the sky.
"Look up."
They sat beneath the naked trees, sipping some tea while they still had some tea to enjoy, and they looked at the stars splattered across the black canvas above.
John held onto Melody's hand and smiled, and her heart filled with contentment and something resembling love.
The cold weather was moving in, and soon they were sure to be encased in snow with nothing but a small fireplace to warm themselves. Their supplies would run out, and the struggle to survive would intensify.
Melody sipped from the warm cup and released a sigh, knowing the storm would never quit. They would just have to listen each day for news from Fort Drummond on the crank radio and wait. The spread of LV01 was sure to wax and wane, and the storms would keep coming, testing Melody's strength, but she would survive. She would fight like mad, like her dad told her to, with a fire in her heart—and under her ass—and she would survive. Even more importantly, she would stick with John and Harkness for as long as she could, and she would laugh, she would love, and in turn, she would live
