by Briana Rain
It shoved its arms through the small holes of the net, peeling back all of the skin from its hand to its shoulder with a sickening sound to match the sight. It snarled at us as the skin dropped from its rotten body, first bouncing on the tattered remains of a dress it once wore, before falling through the bottom of the net and landing on the ground with a sickening plop. With the putrid, rotten skin not there, we could now see the orange bacteria stuff that coated what was left of her arms.
Okay, gross. Very, very gross. But you hadn’t had anything to eat or drink Ophelia, so you couldn’t throw up.
No matter how GROSS it was.
She growled at us, showing off her molars, which I could see, because her entire left side of her face was gone. Just, gone.
Gross!
“Guys!” I called out no longer being concerned with attracting the attention of the other Crazy, because we already had it, while Lucky pointed to my right feverishly. Footsteps to the right followed, along with various curse words from various people.
“Ophelia! Lucky! We can't find anything down here, so you guys have to find something!”
Oh god.
“Lucky, stand up and search the top for where the rope goes.”
He was half sitting on me, and half on the rope. I couldn't see the top because of that stupid blueberry bush that started this whole thing.
Stupid— oh crap. Crap crap crap crap crap crap crap crap.
“But I don't wanna hurt you, O—“
“Lucky just do it! Look!” My eyes were glued to the other net, which wasn't swaying anymore. It was now swinging, as the time between each of its lunges were almost rhythmic, and if I didn't know any better, I'd say that they were measured. But I did know better, and I knew that it's number one and only priority was to consume.
And we were on the menu.
Lucky stood on top of my stomach, repeatedly apologizing. It… yeah, it hurt, and made breathing a bit of a challenge. But, then again, being dead probably also made breathing a bit of a challenge. Just a bit, though. Or two.
“The rope up here goes straight ahead Mommy!” Lucky called out after a nice twenty seconds of searching. A nice twenty seconds where the Crazy next door was able to slash and claw her- it's way through about half of the foliage that separated us from it.
Multiple sets of footsteps went in the direction that Lucky had said. I just hoped that he was right.
“Hang in there, guys!” James yelled.
Now, that was just in bad taste. Who would make a pun in a dire time like this? Apparently, James would.
An explosion sounded. It came from where we were, by the road. Just like I thought, the woods echoed with the response of tens of hundreds of Crazies. They all were shrieking at once, in one, impossibly long shriek. I couldn't tell. What I could tell was that it was deafening. My arms were pinned at a weird, painful angle, so I didn't have the luxury of covering my ears.
The only blessing that this provided was that the Crazy in the other net seemed to have a new goal in mind. It ignored us completely, whether forgetting about us, or placing this newfound task at a higher priority than us, I didn’t know. I was just grateful for it.
The next thing happened very, very quickly. We were in the air, supported, and then we were in the air, unsupported. The others must have found the thing anchoring the net and cut it, because the bush, Lucky, and I fell. We fell fast, and we landed hard. Not so much the bush, which tumbled to the side, but Lucky and I landed in a heap, his elbow digging into my stomach. The wind was knocked out of me, and after his elbow dug into my stomach, Lucky was thrown to the side.
Did I just blackout?
If I did, it couldn’t’ve been for more than a few seconds. Lucky was still on the ground. No one had reached us yet, but boy oh boy were they booking it to get to us.
I just laid there, wondering if I had broken every single bone in my body, or just the ones in my spine.
“Come on.” James bent over and grabbed my hand, his other holding on to his side.
He yanked me to my feet, not even considering the possibility that I would be down for the count.
Yeah, my vision definitely went black for a second. Addeline put her hand on my other shoulder to steady me, which made me jump, because I didn’t know she was near me. I swayed a bit as I watched the swimming stars in my vision fade.
Were my ears ringing?
It seemed to pass, and my face must’ve shown it, because James and Addeline warily let go of my shoulders. Once independently on my feet, I realized that my spine was not shattered in one hundred and one places, so I clumsily scooped up my bat and backpack, which I’d slipped off when I saw the “food”.
There were Crazies. Oh, were there Crazies. But the woods were thick with trees and brush, so all I could see was a figure here, and one over there. Dark silhouettes peeking between the gaps of the trees. They appeared only for the sole purpose of disappearing. Close to us. In the distance. Where we came and where we were heading. We were surrounded, yet free to move as we pleased.
A second explosion sounded, and the shrieking, which had started to die down, rang out at full force again. It was like their passion had been renewed. Their motivation had been doubled. A flash here. A blur there. They ran on and on and on, not in a cluster, but stretched out for miles in all directions, polka dotted throughout the woods and beyond, only to unite with one common goal— to consume.
Clyde and Harrison came sprinting out from the depths of the trees as Mom and Vi were helping Lucky up. He seemed fine and I seemed fine, so the two relaxed ever so slightly.
“We tried to grab the rope and lower it,” Harrison said as he looked at Lucky, who had a large, shallow scratch on his arm that I didn't see before.
That was gonna leave a nasty scar.
It was long, but not deep, which I was grateful for. Beyond grateful. I knew that falling out of the sky could give someone a lot more than a scratch and a bruise.
“Yeah, but it was too damn fast.” Clyde showed us his hands, which displayed a textbook rope burn, and a bad one at that.
Addeline rushed to her brother's side and looked at them, but there wasn't anything we could do yet.
We had to get out of here. ASAP.
Chapter 38: Eye of the Storm
“I only have these two packs.” I said. “You guys are gonna have to split them.”
I handed over the packs of Gold Fish that I’d stowed away in my pack. The ones from the case that Clyde and I had “fished” out from that soccer mom’s minivan. They had slipped to the side of my backpack, and gotten crushed, but not as crushed as they could have gotten at the bottom.
It was decided that the twins, James, and Addeline would split the bags of mostly cheese dust. Both Addeline and James tried to refuse, which would’ve given the twins more to eat, but both were forced to eat by their siblings. The group’s young and injured ate, while I passed around gum to the rest of us. Harrison and Mom immediately unwrapped theirs and popped them into their mouths, while Clyde and I opted to wait. I kept mine in the pack, with the few other pieces that remained, and Clyde stuck his in his pocket.
We sat, and waited. We waited for the others to finish carefully eating, but it was mostly for our lungs and leg muscles to catch up with where our bodies were now. While we waited, Mom put some sort of ointment on Clyde's hands and wrapped them in some ripped fabric that was mostly clean, because Clyde refused actual bandages. He said they could be used for more important things. While that was happening, Harrison did his thing with Lucky, and used bandages and a bunch of other stuff that I didn't pay attention to. I was too busy trying not to throw up at that point. I felt unbelievably nauseous, either from all of the running or my head taking so many hits or maybe a combination of the two.
Getting out of that hurricane was what I’d imagined hell to be like, minus the heat and Lucifer laughing maniacally in the distance. Just blurs and shapes, shadows and shrieks. They weren't capable of having more than one goal in their
minds, so they ignored us. The only times we had run ins with them was when one of them would collide full force into one of us. It was a nonstop shriek that would change in pitch. It didn't happen much, when I thought about how we were all in the eye of the storm, but it happened enough.
My lungs felt like they were in a different time zone, and I feared that I would never catch my breath again.
I slipped my pack off my shoulder, and searched it for water, which wasn't very hard, considering that there wasn't any.
None.
Zilch.
Zippo.
I wasn't the only one with this idea. Both Clyde and Harrison had gone through theirs, and Mom was searching through Vi’s.
Squat.
We had all trusted in the Jeep. Within the last day, a bunch of our supplies had left our packs and had become scattered in the trunk or on the floor.
“I'm gonna go that way,” Clyde pointed into the woods, beyond the path, “and see if there's any water nearby. I'll be back in about twenty, and then we'll keep going if I don't find anything. Sound good?”
Most of us nodded. I was just beginning to get my breathing back to normal.
Clyde shrugged his pack onto his sweat-covered shoulders and left.
After a minute, I realized that he’d left his rifle.
Oh no.
I zipped up my pack, left it on the ground, and grabbed the gun.
“I'll run this to him. Before he gets too far.” I tried to sling it over my shoulder, like Clyde always did, but the strap felt weird, and it was too loose to work right.
With no protests or comments, I held the gun in my hand and quickly went after him.
Okay. Finger off the trigger. Point it at the ground. Okay. It's okay. I totally won't mess this up. It's cool. I’m cool. Cool as a cucumber.
I found him after, like, two minutes of jogging and walking. His pack was open at his feet while he sat on a log.
“C'mon… Damn it!” He angrily threw what he was holding back in his pack and closed his eyes, frustrated.
His coat was thrown on the ground next to his pack, and shirt was half off, his arm pulled out of one sleeve, exposing those scratches he’d shown me a few nights ago in the police station. So many things had happened since that moment in the kitchen, that I had completely forgotten about it. Now that we were in the light, I could see that it was in a more awkward place than I originally thought.
“How bad does that hurt?” I almost asked, does it hurt, but that question was even stupider than the one I went with.
It was a half a foot of open, swollen, angry skin. Yeah, I'm gonna go on a whim here and say that it probably hurts.
“It doesn't!” he snapped, “It… well it does, but it doesn't matter. I just need to get something on it so we can leave.”
He regretted the snapping pretty darn quick and replaced being defensive with being macho.
I noticed some bloodied, makeshift bandages thrown off to the side that must’ve been covering the wound before. How he got them on before was a mystery to me, and apparently to him as well.
“Why’d you follow me?” He asked, apparently not being able to decide between being defensive and being macho.
“You left your gun.” I shrugged, looking down at it, and keeping it pointed at the ground.
Because I'm not an idiot— at least not in this moment.
“I left it on purpose.” He reached down, flinching, and brought out his knife. The same one he had when we first met. “There's hundreds of Sticks out there. There's no way I'm shooting that thing.”
I felt like I shouldn't’ve been here, and at the same time, Clyde didn't want me here.
“Okay, then. I'll— I'll, um, go back then. Sorry.”
Ophelia! Would you please, for one goddamn minute, stop being awkward.
But, it wasn't in my programming, so instead of being cool, or trying to help Clyde, who looked like he desperately needed it, I turned, and started to walk away.
“Wait!”
I waited.
“Could you… could you help me with this stupid thing?” He grumbled, and with how far away I was, I almost didn't hear it.
But, I did.
I walked into the middle of the small clearing, out of the tree line. The sun was more visible here, no longer filtered by thousands of leaves, and I flinched. Since I only had one fully working eye at this point, I found myself temporarily blinded.
I sat down on the fallen tree next to him, and leaned the gun against the trunk next to me. When I let go, it started sliding down, and I expertly caught it and repositioned it.
Clyde handed me this, like, weird bandage-patch thing that I had absolutely no idea how to use. It was made out of, like, plastic? Like, it wasn't fabric, or sticky, it was just…
Oh, for Pete’s sake.
I peeled the bandage covering off to reveal a large cotton square with a adhesive border.
Wowie. A wrapper on a bandaid. Who could have thought of that??? Not Ophelia, that's who!
His back was bleeding, but it was nothing like when I had to “patch up” James, if you could call it that. I carefully pressed the bandage onto the worst of the scratch, which was in the middle. He didn't even flinch, not even when my fingers accidentally brushed the swollen, angry skin.
His skin was hot. Burning hot.
In another world, another time, another place; I would've been worried about that. But I couldn't worry over a fever now. We were right there. Right on the edge of Washington. We were so close. So close to being safe. I could practically taste the absence of constant paranoia.
I handed the wrapper back to him, and avoided eye contact. I noticed there were huge bruises on his back, mostly along his spine. The only reason I could think of for them was when he fell out of the ceiling at the school in Wisconsin.
His chest was still exposed, and his breathing was heavier than it should've been. He said that it didn't hurt, and that he could deal with it, but his body language told me something different.
“So—“
“Hey, can I—“
The two of us broke the silence at the same time. I meant to say that I should be heading back to the others, and Clyde… well, I didn’t know what he was going to ask.
The unfiltered sun felt even hotter on my face as neither of us continued our sentences. He stared at my mess of face, while my eyes darted between the area around the bandage, the bruises, the ground, and the trees past his face.
“Hey, can I ask you something?” With his accent, he didn't say something, like I would, but somethin’.
“Sure.”
There was a quiet scraping sound next to me, so I whipped around, and caught what I knew was the rifle.
“When you were up in that net… you told your brother that you were almost twice his age. But… you told me that you were only sixteen.”
He was being careful in choosing his words. My back was turned, still trying to find a place where the gun could lean and not fall over and kill us both. Even after I found a spot, I knew that I didn't want to turn around. He sounded confused, and maybe a bit guilty for asking. The question hinted that I lied to him, which I totally didn't, but all in all, I understood him wanting to know my age. I, myself, was obsessed with ages and knowing them. When you knew someone's age, you knew where they were in life, and maybe some of the things that they've gone through. Like, if someone was sixteen, they'd be looking at driving, and high school. At eighteen: college and adulthood. At sixty-four: optional retirement. At sixty-six: government enforced retirement.
But sixteen, for me, has come and gone.
“Technically, I didn't tell you anything… You assumed I was sixteen, and I just— I just never corrected you.” The one glance that I finally took to look at his face… was one I regretted. There was some anger— at me. And some confusion— also at me.
“Clyde, listen. Like, thirty seconds before I met you, this guy— like, he… I don't know. This guy asked my age, and when I told him I w
as seventeen, he just… It was like Christmas for him. Like, because I was older, he wouldn't feel…”
It was hard— no, impossible— to get out a sentence now. It was easy to look at his face now, mostly because he had uncomfortably turned away and was now looking intensely at the wrapper still bunched up in his fingers.
“Don't. I mean… you don't have to explain. I understand.”
He took several deep breaths as we sat in silence. He faced straightforward, and I watched him, not knowing what to say.
But nothing else came. He was silent, and angry. The wrapper went from being bunched in his hands to clutched and twisted as the moments ticked by. The sun ducked behind some cloud, then popped back out as a breeze rustled the leaves near the top of the tangled branches above us.
Clyde's shirt was still half off, by the way.
The breeze lifted his hair for a moment before it went on to make its temporary mark on something else. His lips were pressed together, and his eyebrows were scrunched up, like he was mad at something. I had good money that that something was either me, or the man whose jerky he had ate.
Or both.
And in this moment, this uncommonly calm, beautiful moment, I stupidly, foolishly, and idiotically kissed him.
Emphasis on the stupid. Emphasis on the foolishness. And emphasis on me being an idiot.
Instead of sitting, and allowing myself to be drawn closer, I sprung up.
“Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god!” Panicked, I turned away from him and pushed my hands against my forehead, sliding them back until they were in my tangled mess I call hair.
It was… I don't know.
It was the past few days. The moments in the kitchen. In the closet. Waking up next to him in the car. It was the adrenaline. It was… It was just him. He was a really attractive guy, inside and out, if I let myself see it. He was always there when I slipped up and had saved my life countless of times. Saved my family’s lives.
“What did I just do? I didn't think! I didn't even ask! Oh, I'm so, so sorry. You probably didn't even feel like that, much less want to do that, and ohmygodI'msuchanidiotohmygodwha—“
