Every Dark Little Thing

by T. S. Ward

  I didn’t think she would actually hurt him, but I should have known better. I should know better.

  Even still, it’s a shock when I come across the trucks and the beetles in the street. I’m on a supply run when I cut through an alley that’s been overtaken by grass and vines and weeds and wildflowers—it’s beautiful, really.

  Nature reclaiming what we took.

  And in stark contrast to this little town being devoured by plants are the beetles dressed in their shiny black helmets and their black armour with their black guns. Lana dressed in white again, completely indifferent to the sight of her white-dressed lab rats holding Oliver still, injecting him with this needle while the beetles hold a biter back.

  I’m sure it’s supposed to be a cure, an immunization, a vaccine. I hope to hell that it works. Yet, I don’t trust it to at all.

  There’s a long moment of shock that pins me in place when I see all of this, and then I completely lose it. I see Sadie in him. I see that girl who stabbed me, and her sister I shot, and those kids in that tent. All the scars this woman has left on me burn hot.

  I duck low behind rusted out vehicles, slink to their trucks. I try to move slow. I try to move as quietly as possible, but this woman is about to feed this child to a goddamn living corpse and I know he won’t survive it.

  I slash the tires on the truck.

  There’s a beetle on watch behind the other one, facing away. I sneak up behind them, holding my breath. I leap up. Sink the knife up under the helmet. Hit the radio switch off at the same time. The beetle gurgles, convulses, and I drop them to my feet.

  I slash the tires on this truck, too.

  A pair of beetles stand watch further down, and I rush back behind the rusted cars.

  My heart is in my throat. Lana is pushing the boy forward.

  I find a broken beer bottle in the grass and chuck it into the window of a building behind the two beetles. They both look at each other, look back toward the sound, and start into the building with their guns drawn.

  I have one grenade. I pull the pin and chuck it in after them.

  My gun is in my hand before it explodes, and as soon as it does, I turn on the last two beetles and shoot through the hull of this rusted car. They both collapse, and then the biter lunges forward.

  I shoot it, too, and then it’s just the lab rats and Lana.

  “Oliver!” I call out, staying behind cover. “Oliver, it’s Ghost! Remember me?”

  “Get back!” Lana screams, “It’s going to work!”

  I crawl around the front of the car and peek out at them.

  Lana is backing away, a case clutched in her arms rather than the child. It’s the lab rats who have him. It’s the lab rats who won’t let him run—and he’s trying. There are tears streaming down his face. He’s telling them let me go, let me go, let me go!

  I take a deep breath, lie in the tall grass and weeds, and aim the gun. I shoot.

  She screams so damn loud and rough I’m sure I’ve hit her, but there’s a hole in that case and she’s trying desperately to check its contents for damage while diving into the truck.

  “Let the kid go!” I shout, firing into the ground next to the rats.

  They panic, fall back.

  “Oliver!”

  The kid runs to the sound of my voice. He trips over me, and I scramble to my hands and knees and push him toward the alley. We run. And run. And run.

  When we finally stop, in some place I think will be safe, I lose my shit.

  I just kidnapped a kid.

  I couldn’t let her do that to him. I couldn’t let her use him as a guinea pig. She isn’t wrong, either. I love him already, if only because he’s part Ben Daniels. If only because he’s a little Soldier, and it’s all I have left of something that was so good, of someone who was so good to me.

  We look for his dad the entire time. The entire year we have together. I take him to the farmhouse and find it empty. I take him to the hotel and find it empty. I retrace our steps as much as we can and find nothing.

  But we were looking, Ben. We never stopped looking.

  YEAR FIVE

  Day Ninety-Eight

  We’re cornered.

  I’m panicking.

  “You’re never scared,” Oli says to me.

  I don’t know what to do. We woke up to a horde in the street, and every damn door is covered by them. They’re breaking in. The main door is already giving way.

  Our options are slim.

  “Alright. Alright.” There are windows on the tops of the walls that open, and shelves we can climb. “Come here, Oli. I have a way out.”

  The main doors shatter and screech as they’re broken off their hinges and pushed across the gritty tile. A flood of biters spills in, stumbling over each other, growling. They know we’re here. They sense us. Smell us. They’re moving quickly.

  I lift Oli up to the first shelf, and then climb up with him. He’s too short to climb to the next one, and I’m barely tall enough myself, so I hold onto the edge. I give him my hand.

  “You’re going to have to climb up,” I tell him.

  He nods, takes my hand, and sets one foot against my leg. He jumps up and catches the shelf with one hand.

  “Okay? You got it? I’m going to let go and push you up, alright?”

  He tightens his grip and nods again. I let go of his hand, wrap my arm around his knees, and make sure I’ve got my balance before letting go of the shelf. He sets his feet in my hands and I push up as he pulls himself onto the next shelf.

  “You good, bud?”

  The damn biters are already in this aisle.

  “Yeah!” He calls down to me.

  I grab the edge of the shelf and jump, throwing an elbow over it. I swing a leg up just as the biters reach us. Oli tries his best to help me. It feels like a victory, making it up here, but the damn things are grabbing the shelf. It’s rocking. Shifting.

  “Come on, come on! Up again!” I usher him over, chucking things off the shelf to distract at least some of them.

  He takes my hand and jumps to grab the next shelf, but my nerves make my palms sweaty, and the biters are making the whole thing shake. His hand slips. He wobbles. Loses his balance. I grab his wrist and fall with him, holding him as he dangles over the mob.

  “Oli, get up, climb up!”

  He screams, eyes wide, face pale. He grabs higher up on my arm, kicking at the grabbing biters.

  I get him up. “You good?”

  He nods.

  “Alright,” I breathe out, nodding, turning to assess our options.

  My hands are shaking after that. The shelf is shaking, bashing against the wall. I walk to the edge and reach for the window ledge. There’s a light in the wall that I prop my foot against. I wipe my palm against my pants and reach for him.

  “Just like before,” I say.

  He hesitates, and then he takes my hand. The shelf shudders under us and I pull him to me, gritting my teeth as his foot digs into my thigh. He pushes up, twists, grabs the top of the shelf, and I give him a hand to step up on.

  I wait until he’s ready and safe.

  “Open the window!” I call up, and he disappears.

  It’s an effort to jump, pushing myself off the light and window ledge, but I make it. I shimmy my way up and rush to help him crank open the window.

  “It won’t open!” He says, using all of his strength.

  The damn thing is rusted, but it shifts. I back up. The shelf isn’t very long. I can see all the way down to the mass of gray and brown and green, the occasional bright spot of a wig or a shirt standing out, but mostly it’s contorted hands and rotted faces. The sight of it makes me dizzy.

  I kick the window and nearly lose my balance. It moves, and he tries again, but it’s still stuck. I take a breath. Ready myself. Find my footing.

  I kick it again, and it bursts open.

  “There’s a roof on the other side,” I tell Oli, shouldering my bag off. “Climb through. I’m going to pass th
is to you. Hurry!”

  He starts to climb out, and I look back over the building. There’s so much noise, and so many of these shambling ghouls searching for us. A shelf falls over in one of the aisles and crushes a large swathe of them.

  “Ghost!” Oli calls.

  I turn back and move to the window, pushing my bag through.

  “Got it,” he says.

  The shelf wobbles. I hold the side of the window and pick up a foot to swing it through, but the damn bastards move the shelf again. It leans away from the wall and I lose my grip, lose my footing. I slip down the painted brick and grab for the ledge.

  They’re holding the shelf on an angle from just the sheer mass of bodies.

  I push a foot against it, grimacing, cursing. I twist, set a shoe against the wall.

  “Fuck this,” I mutter.

  It takes a few tries and a hell of a lot of muscle to push off the shelf and drag myself up. I climb head first out of the window, one arm wrapped around it so I don’t just land on the kid.

  There’s a chunk of metal sticking out of the side of the building that I nearly cut myself on as I slide down and drop to the roof.

  I kneel down next to Oli. “I don’t want you to ever think that I’m not afraid. I am. I am terrified, all the time, but that’s how we stay alive. That’s how I keep us alive.”

  Day Ninety-Nine

  I wake up to the sound of the barn door rattling, but it’s the laboured, quiet breaths that make me panic.

  “Oli?”

  I sit up, search through the dark.

  “Oliver?”

  He’s a tiny lump curled up on top of his sleeping bag.

  “Oliver.”

  The barn door bursts open as I start crawling toward him, and I fall, startled. Catch myself on an elbow.

  “Oliver!”

  I crawl over to him again, but it’s dark, and the horde has caught up with us in the night. I set a hand on his cheek as I watch them spill in and mill about below us.

  “Oliver.”

  He’s cold. Covered in sweat. Moving, slightly, but not very much.

  I pull my knife and crawl over to my bag. It’s resting near the edge of the loft. There are doors up here we can jump out of, and then we can get in the truck, and then we can drive someplace else. Leave these things behind. Not that we’ll get far with the amount of gas we—

  A heavy lump collapses by my feet. Small hands grab my leg and pull with strength I didn’t think he had—he. Oliver. Oli. Growling. Teeth gnashing. Fingernails digging into my skin as I push myself away.

  I knock the bag down in my surprise, in my haste.

  He launches himself at me as I try to grab it, knocking the knife from my hand. I reach for it, heart pounding, my brain not believing what I’m seeing.

  How? When? Why? Why? Why?

  He’s a biter. A ghoul. This tiny child.

  And there’s one damn thought that comes to me. Nothing else, just: her goddamn bone-marrow vaccine bullshit didn’t work.

  “Oliver!” I shout at him, pointlessly. Uselessly.

  He doesn’t know his name anymore.

  My hand knocks the knife away while the other holds him by the shirt, and I turn my head to watch it fall off the edge. I have nothing.

  I have nothing.

  I can’t leave him like this.

  I have nothing.

  He’s so damn strong, and I have nothing.

  Nothing except my hands.

  —

  I locked the barn door on the horde. I spent all night digging a hole in the field behind the barn, with my hands. I couldn’t get the feeling to leave.

  I scratched his name onto a plank with a rock, and I left myself in there, too. I have been a husk, leading the horde away from my bag and my knife. I have been outside of myself this entire time.

  Nothing feels real.

  —

  And, Ben—

  You have touched these hands that have committed such horrors and it makes me sick. You have given me so much and I deserve none of it. So much kindness written in the margins of my bullshit.

  Day One Hundred And Three

  The sun is coming up now. The sun is rising and drawing mist up from the soil, and my hands are aching, and I know I won’t be able to look Soldier in the eye again.

  I feel sick that I did before I told him. I feel sick that I touched him. I feel sick that he touched me.

  I have everything I own packed in this bag, and I’m tired.

  I’m done.

  I walk around the front of the house listening to the silence and the frogs chirping in the mist, journal clutched in my hand.

  “Where are you off to?”

  I stop, looking over to the steps. Lou’s sitting there, elbows on his knees, watching me. I hold out the journal to him. “Can you give this to—to Sam?”

  He stares at me for a long while, eyeing up my backpack, looking me over, studying the journal held out in my hand. He stands up and stomps over to me. “I said where are you off to?”

  “Look,” I breathe out, “I destroy everything I touch. He’s not going to forgive me for what I did. Everyone’s better off without me—I’ve been here for two, three days, and look at what I’ve managed to do—”

  “Shut the hell up,” he growls. “Just shut up with that bullshit.”

  I shake my head. “Give this to him.”

  He grabs the strap of my bag and pulls it off my shoulder, hissing, “Give it to him yourself. It’s goddamn shit like this that fucks you over. Shit like this is exactly why no one looks for you when you disappear. You take off and act like no one cares about you—fuck off with that, Keely, for once in your damn life. You have all these people going out of their way to help you, talking you through your bullshit, and you want to tell me you’re leaving because no one likes you? You disappear before anyone gets the chance to know you. That’s your only problem. Not whatever the fuck you’re saying.”

  “Dad,” I sigh, reaching to fix my bag.

  “Just stay put.”

  “You don’t understand. I can’t. I…”

  He throws his hands out to the sides. “You what? You fought an entire horde of ghouls and saved a kid? You’ve got Sam talking, and he never talks. Fox and Viking are ecstatic that you’re here—hell, even Jenny is glad you’re alright.”

  I force a smile. “Even Jenny, huh?”

  “Knock it off,” he says, shaking his head. “She’s basically a stand in for you when you take off.”

  I know his intention in saying that. To make me jealous that he has a replacement daughter. Except, it resigns me to my decision, knowing he’ll be fine without me.

  He won’t let me go, so I nod slowly.

  “Alright,” I say, glancing toward the barn. “Alright, I just… I can’t handle all these people, and I can’t… Give this to him, please. I’m going back to that other house and I’m going to sleep. I’ll see you later.”

  Lou grabs my arm as I push the journal into his hands. He ducks his head and looks into my eyes. “Promise?”

  “Promise.”

  —

  I’ve been gone for hours.

  My feet and my legs are aching. I’ve been walking since I left Lou standing there, walking down this road since dawn, since the sun first cut through the fog in the trees. It rose, hovered high above me, and now it’s falling, sliding slowly down the other side of the world.

  Everything glows with this golden light. Even the small horde I come across, marching from field to field over the road.

  I stop and stand there, staring at them.

  They don’t pay any attention to me. They have those goddamn ugly swollen tongues and liquified eyes these local groups have.

  I drop my bag on the road and pull out my knife.

  “Hey! Idiots! Snack time!” I shout at them.

  They barely notice a disturbance. They don’t even give a shit. I am a Ghost, even to them, non-existent and not worth an ounce of care. Not even worth it for the dead.
And that’s just about the dumbest shit, so I start screaming.

  I scream at them, letting out this weight that’s crushing my chest, screaming out everything in the pit of my stomach.

  “Fuck you! Fuck you, you pieces of shit!”

  They start to turn, but they still don’t seem like they know I’m there. One of them opens its mouth, tongue rolling out long and nasty, nearly reaching down to its protruding belly. The sight makes my stomach churn.

  As they hobble closer and I keep yelling, I get a closer, longer look at them. Pustules of oozing green coat them.

  “Jesus Christ, you’re fucking nasty,” I mutter. “I’d swallow that tongue, if I were you. Just keep your fucking mouth shut and maybe people will like you more. Ever think about that? Ever consider you’re the reason why no one likes you? Or maybe you know that already! Can’t change what you are, and what you are is a complete fucking screw up, ruining everything you touch. Can’t die, but can’t stop killing, can you? Fucking psychopath. No fucking better than her, are you? No better than him.”

  There’s a point early on in my tirade where I realize I’m talking to myself, but I don’t stop. I keep going. And I take these snakes out one by one as I do. When the last one falls, I’m completely screwed.

  My back is fucked. My leg is going numb. It’s been a while since that last happened. Worse still, my head is a fucking hurricane raging against my skull, and I collapse on the road.

  I sit there, surrounded by these things with their acid tongues hanging loose and sizzling against the pavement.

  The fields are turning golden under the last light of day. Green. Growing. Old seeds returning with weeds. The light is lovely. The sky is a violent mess of colours, red and pink and orange and purple, the clouds piled high with them. Stars peek through the gaps of powder blue.

  It’s beautiful, despite the death around me.

  I stand up, wipe off my hands and the knife, and I tuck it back where it belongs. I start walking again.

  Just as the sun is dipping below the horizon, another light cuts across my back and sends my shadow crawling long ahead of me. I don’t fully realize what it is, until the driver lays on the horn, and I flinch, turning around.