by Astor Penn
There are no lights, no gunfire, no screams left—it is quiet, or so I think, as best as I can hear. Poppy runs beside me, the blood drying on her front. She wobbles while I heavily limp. We’ll need to stop soon—we’ve been moving all night, and from the few glances I’ve risked, my ankle looks twice its normal size. The pain is so intense throughout my entire body that I fear stopping because I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to move again. Faced with what could lead to bleeding out or more likely infection, I swing from hysteria to cold-faced calm.
There’s an open and still very bloody hole in my shoulder, and we’ve both been exposed to the contagion. My ragged breathing isn’t from running but from the thought of the high risk of infection at this very moment. It’s been a hundred and twenty-eight days now since the news went off air; over one hundred days I’ve survived on my own.
I might as well stop. I might as well give up. When faced with what could have easily been my end just nights ago, upon first meeting Poppy, Bryant, Aaron, and Raven—my heart stops for a moment thinking of Raven. Where is Raven?—I was ready to run until my lungs gave out. Now, I’m just tired. All I want to do is stop running for a little while. I just won’t be able to get up again this time.
But I don’t stop. I’ve trained myself too well. Moving is living. Moving is life. Just keep putting one foot in front of the other, and everything will be all right.
Poppy trips and crawls a few meager feet while I limp on, no faster than her crawling; when she stops I say nothing but flop down beside her. We’re in the open between some trees, and I can’t even begin to imagine how far from a water source, but I can’t care. We’re both shaking from exertion and the chill that’s set in during the night. She rolls into me and huddles against my side, face-first into my bloody shirt. She opens the bag Bryant made, and I think, with a pang, of Raven, who’s out there somewhere with my own bag.
Immediately she tears into water and, shortly after, a protein bar. I take the bottle of water with some difficulty and sip it as calmly as I can before passing it back to her. When she gulps it down, I’m too tired to warn her. She’ll be sick soon.
“We can’t stay here long.” Neither of us moves a muscle. My voice sounds odd, the ringing in my ears overpowering it. “Sunrise will be here soon.”
And in the daylight, they won’t need much to hunt us. I’m torn between disbelief and belief that they are still pursuing us, but I’m not sure how far into the woods we are or how big the territory is at this point. If there aren’t miles of untamed terrain between us and the road, then they could still be around.
“Poppy.” My voice cracks. I sound even weaker than I feel. “Where are you from originally? Close to Atlanta?”
She shakes her head. “North Carolina.”
“Do you know anything about this area at all?”
She shakes her head again. Her hair tickles my skin beneath my chin. “You got shot.” Her voice wobbles horribly. She’s about to cry.
“It’s—” I almost say fine, but it isn’t. Nothing is fine. Then I almost open my mouth to say something about the infected woman who grabbed her; does she suspect the woman was a carrier? She clearly has never seen anyone infected up close before. Does she know about her own chances right now? She’s crying for me because she thinks I’m hurt, but she could have no idea about her own likelihood of survival at this very moment.
“Poppy.” I lick my dry, cracked lips. Even they’re bleeding. “Raven came back for us. She’s somewhere close.” I stop to look at her, at how scared and how young she looks right now, all adult intuition gone. I don’t know how I can ask this of her.
“Do you think you can look for her? Just in the immediate area.” I don’t want her getting lost where I can’t find her, and with my injuries, anything outside a half-mile radius will be too far for me to search. “And I only want you to look for an hour, once it’s daylight. If you don’t see any sign of her, you’ll come straight back to me.”
Poppy looks like she might be sick—and I don’t know if it’s the heavy food on her empty stomach or, God forbid, the infection. I feel sick myself, and not only from pain. I need Raven. I’m too injured to make it far with just myself to rely on and a young girl relying on me, but if we are infected… maybe Raven would be better on her own. What am I thinking?
“You know what,” I pant, about to tell her to forget it in the most nonchalant fashion possible. I mean to flop backward to prove it, too tired to keep upright any longer, but I immediately screech as my back hits the ground. In the hazy mist of undifferentiated pain, I had almost forgotten about the bullet lodged in my shoulder. I roll onto my good side. I’m cursing a long stream of unintelligible words when Poppy pulls out the first aid kit.
“I’ll clean you up,” she says quietly. We have hydrogen peroxide to clean the wound and some kind of generic antibiotic; what we don’t have are bandages big enough to wrap around my shoulder, which results in a patchwork job of Band-Aids and torn cloth on top of each other. We don’t have the means to remove the bullet, of course, and no one anywhere would, except perhaps the people who put it there in the first place, but I’m doubtful they’d be so kind as to pull it out for me now.
Experimentally, I rotate my shoulder in a circle through the thickness of the bandaging—it’s stiff, and I think that I can feel the bullet chafing against bone inside of me. Picking up my knife, the only thing I physically have on me, I practice a halfhearted throw with my right hand—my dominant hand and wounded side—and watch as it falls forward maybe four feet from us. I’m panting with effort and pain.
Poppy retrieves it for me; I try with my left hand for the first time. The results are even worse.
“Here, you try.” If I can’t throw a knife, maybe I can at least teach her. This is what I hope, but in reality, I’m fighting back tears. I’m useless, and we may as well be dead now.
“Stand with your feet farther apart. And relax your shoulders.” The more I talk, the saner I feel. The wobble from my voice disappears, even if its roughness prevails in at least my own head. I can’t imagine what I sound like to her—or is her hearing off too? “Now, inhale and aim, then throw and exhale at the same time.”
Her aim isn’t much better than mine with my weak hand. “Maybe you can practice.” I don’t know why I bother—she’ll need a weapon of choice to survive for long, but with every passing second, I feel sure we won’t last another day. Or at best, more than a few days. The infection works fast, but not that fast. We’ll feel symptoms within the next twenty-four window, I’m sure.
“Come on.” I crawl toward a tree, then wave her toward me. We plant our backs to the bark and rest. “Let’s sleep for a while.”
“At the same time?”
“Yes.” It doesn’t matter whether we bother taking watches. She must see it written on my face, and whether she completely understands the entire situation, she knows we’re in trouble. “I don’t want you to worry about it.”
I’m so tired it doesn’t matter that I’m twisted awkwardly against the tree to avoid my shoulder. I barely rest my head against it, and I’m almost instantly asleep, covered not only in exhaustion and pain but desolation and desperation. This time, it won’t be a half-conscious sleep. Beside me, I briefly register Poppy’s shuddering body—she’s crying, I think—between my last moments of lucidity. Crying for who? Me, her, Bryant? Crying for all of us.
THERE’S SOMETHING hovering near my ear when I wake up. It’s moving and buzzing, and before I even think about it, I swat at it. It stings, of course—when I look at my fingers, I see the remains of something black with a stinger, a wasp of some kind. Just one more fresh pain to add on top of the others. I barely try to move, just roll my neck and stretch my legs out from where they’ve been cramped for hours, but my body suddenly feels like a vise tightens around it. I gasp, and when I try to replace the air, I can’t breathe.
My choking sounds wake Poppy up, her head rolling off my shoulder. After she shakes the blurriness out of h
er eyes, she sees me and panics.
“What’s wrong? Are you all right?” There are tears again. I can’t deal with more tears. “Brie!”
Her panicked voice immediately irritates me, as if I don’t have enough on my plate without her adding to it.
“I’m okay, okay?” The anger in my voice isn’t intentional, but she flinches all the same. “I need you to keep it together for me, all right? I’m just sore. We’ve got some more pain meds, right?”
We count them together—these meds were something I split between Bryant’s bag and my own, so the number isn’t great, and I’m faced with the option of rationing them in hopes that we’ll have time to need them again in the future, or taking as many as I need now to make this simple for myself. I decide on just one, wishing I could take a second, but we both will need them if the infection does set in. It always brings fever.
“How are you feeling?” I ask her. Besides her constantly frail-looking physique with new minor cuts and red eyes, she looks all right. I want to reach out a hand and check her skin for warmth; I want to tuck her hair behind her ears and make sure they’re not bleeding from the blasts.
I don’t do any of these things. I sit there and I ask this because I don’t want to know the truth, and I’m not her mother. I’m no one to her, and yet her life is now in my hands, and what a short life it may end up being. I just don’t have the courage to tell her.
“I’m fine.” She sniffles but immediately sucks it up and adds, “I’m not the one who was stupid enough to get shot.”
“Yeah, carrying you if I remember correctly.” We smile, but I know both our thoughts dwell on one thing: what happened to Bryant and Aaron.
“Do you think…?”
“They might still be alive?” Anything is possible, I suppose, even if highly unlikely. “Maybe. Facts are we heard distinct gunshots, and they didn’t have anywhere to go.”
Surprisingly, her eyes stay dry. I forget that she’s lost both her parents already. How many more will she lose? Will I be one of them? Or will we both go together?
“I’m sorry,” I add. “We’d best move on. We don’t have enough hope for them to stay here.”
Regardless of whether or not it’ll ultimately matter, we pack up our bag, because neither she nor I need to be sitting around worrying. We’ll stick to ourselves if we come across anyone—those others from the town have to be around somewhere, and it’s unlikely they’ll know how to survive in open spaces. Maybe there were more infected in that town—hell, they all could be infected. I wouldn’t be surprised if they were the last sentimental fools on earth tucked away in their little town trying to care for the sick. Those are the people who should be shot. Those are the people who are ill prepared or unable to help anyone, least of all themselves, and they’re the reason the infection has spread. Someone, somewhere, took too long reporting this illness, didn’t notify the right person, and maybe those first few people thought it was only the flu, but at some point, people were aware, and there were still some who didn’t care. They hid it away in their homes, and then it spread to the neighbors’ homes, then whole countries.
Rage is a good thing; it’s what drives us to do what we have to do, and rage is all I have now. It’s part of what’s driven me this far: rage for my city, my country, my school, and my few friends. For my family, who might still be out there, even if I can only believe it on my good days. For Bryant. For Raven, may she still be out there on her own, far from any of us. Even for Aaron.
As we fold the last item into our bag, I notice one thing I didn’t anticipate being there: Bryant’s leather cuff. The one with the tallies in it. I take it out, turning my back to Poppy, who is already standing and walking around the area. I take my knife and add one more. One hundred and twenty-eight. That’s when it lost its owner and turned hands. I hide it back inside the bag. Perhaps I should mark it with an X.
“All right, let’s get moving. Did you find anything I can use?”
Standing is a fresh hell. Poppy holds up a thick branch, but it’s probably only midthigh on me. “Yeah, okay, maybe not.” I smile, but it fades as soon as I try to walk on my ankle. It’s painful but manageable with the pain meds. “Guess I’ll have to use you as my walking stick. Come here.”
Really I just want to keep her close to me, but I gently rest my hand on her shoulder without actually putting much weight on her. We move slowly; there’s no rush right now. Not with everything hanging in the balance like it is.
“Where we going?”
“We’ll head south.” Like Bryant intended to do with her. We won’t get far today, but it’s important to keep moving when there are hazmats out there somewhere, and if in the morning we’re both fever and blood-oozing free, we’ll double our pace and actually start traveling south. Right now it’s important to maintain routine for Poppy’s sake, so we’ll meander.
“What about your family?” she asks.
“I’ll look for them later, maybe.” Never, probably.
It’s around noon when we start, and it’s only a couple of hours later when we hear the signs of other people in the woods. Not hazmats—these people are too loud, but in the way they move and talk, distinctly human passersby. From a distance, we guess there have to be at least five or six of them together, but possibly many more.
“Don’t you want to find out what they’re doing?” Poppy asks, standing on her tiptoes as if that will allow her to see a mile away, where they must be.
I don’t want to see these people; for all I know, we forced these people out of their homes, and if they understand that, letting them see us may not end well, especially when I can’t run and Poppy has nothing she can adequately use to defend herself. Spying on them to see what direction they’re headed may not be the worst idea, though.
“I could climb this tree.” Poppy knocks at the bark we’re cowering behind.
“So long as you can get yourself back down.”
Grinning at me, she hikes herself up to the top. She’s a fast climber; I wonder if her father or mother taught her how to climb trees. Today she’s moving twice as fast as me while my ankle throbs at twice its size. An injury like this wouldn’t last too long if I kept off it, but I no longer know the peace of stillness. Moving is breathing. Moving is life.
“What do you see?”
“They’re still far-off, but—” She pauses, squinting against the sun. “There must be a dozen of them, and they’re not moving at all. They have a fire, I think. Most are clustered together, so it’s hard to tell what they’re doing.”
They’ve made camp, then, and they haven’t even made it five miles from the town. They may be waiting it out. Maybe they’re planning on the hazmats chasing us out of the area so they can move back in. We’re their bait, and to the victors go the spoils. They’ll have their town back.
If they’re not all infected, or the hazmats don’t find them first. Idiots. Even if a fire isn’t as noticeable during daylight, it still gives off enough smoke they’ll be findable. We should move on.
“Anything else obvious about them?” I ask, afraid to hear that some of them might be doubled over or unmoving.
“They’re all adults. They don’t have many things with them.”
“All right, come down.” Of course, they wouldn’t have had time to grab much. They’re probably cold and hungry. At least there isn’t anything that screams illness from her description.
“Now what?” She lands in a cloud of dust, cheeks rosy, and for once, she looks like a little girl just playing in a tree.
“Now we move on.”
Poppy’s face betrays her; she looks upset by the prospect of leaving. “You don’t want to help them?”
“We can’t help them, Poppy.” I clutch her shoulder again, squeezing it, and if I dig my fingers in more than is strictly necessary, well. “We don’t have enough supplies for more than two people.” We don’t even have enough supplies for the two of us, but she doesn’t need to know that.
She turns
away. “Bryant would have helped them.”
If my entire body wasn’t already throbbing in pain, this would sting. I already know what kind of person I am. I don’t need her reminders. “I’m sorry. There’s nothing we can do for them.”
“What’s the point of living if we don’t live for other people?”
I laugh bitterly. What a simplistic, childish thing to say. It feels good to see Poppy cringe, especially when she hears the ice in my voice. “Now that’s Bryant I hear.”
Look where helping others got Bryant—dead, probably left to rot in that old, dirty bathroom in the pharmacy. If he hadn’t stopped to take Poppy along with him, he probably wouldn’t have ever met me and would probably be miles away somewhere, living, breathing.
But there’s no reason to feel guilt for long; a man like Bryant would have gotten himself killed one way or another eventually trying to aid someone, doesn’t even matter who. It’s time to strap the armor back on, raise a deaf ear to any little girl’s complaints.
“Even Aaron stayed with us to help.”
The rage is swelling. I burst. “Look, do you want to live or not? Because that’s what this comes down to in the end. Maybe those are good people. Maybe they’re not. Regardless, we can’t stop every time we see someone, because I guarantee they’re not all good, and it’s only going to take one bad person to hurt us.”
Poppy is not an adult. That’s why Bryant took her and why he gave her to me. I’ll make the decisions for her, so long as she can’t, and if that day were to come when she could make them herself, I would gladly let her go to those people who might welcome her with open arms, or might also eat her alive. Unfortunately, I’m certain we’ll both run out of time before that day can come.
But I’m not an adult either, at least not in the way we used to define it. This conversation is absurd. A few months ago, I sat behind a desk while teachers told me what to do and when to do it. I took the classes my counselor suggested because I didn’t know where I wanted to attend university, nor did I know what I might want to do with my life after graduation. I had no special gifts or interests. Perhaps my penchant for being a loner early on helped, but otherwise I was just as ill-prepared as anyone. I followed, never led.
