by Fitch, E. M.
She didn't even get to bury her, didn't get a wake or a funeral or any of the traditional methods for laying to rest someone who had meant so much to her. She couldn't tell her father, not now and maybe not ever. Because the only reason he agreed to leave their home in the first place was because he was convinced that Emma being immune was the answer to a cure, a cure for the infection and salvation for his wife. If she took that away from him now, he may not be able to hold himself together, even for his girls.
Kaylee took her eyes from Jack and watched Anna settle her father into his sleeping bag. She had already checked his bandages and was nodding reassuringly. It was still strange to see him so weak, but even as she thought it, Anna was feeding him pills and urging him to sleep. She hoped he'd be different once he didn't have to take them anymore.
Her eyes flit back to Jack and she squirmed when she found his staring straight back at her. There was a question in those dark eyes.
"I'll take first watch," he said, still staring at Kaylee. Quinton nodded his approval.
And because Kaylee didn't know what to say to him, or how to say it, and she didn't think she could sleep if he were to continue staring at her expectantly, she spoke aloud to the rest if the group instead. "I'll take second watch."
"That's fine," Quinton said just as Nick said, "No!"
"She can't even shoot," Nick argued. His voice was groggy, laced with fear. Kaylee knew it was hard for him, allowing his daughters to be in harms way. But it was different now. Without the safety net of the firehouse, protection couldn't come in the same form. Kaylee and Emma couldn't be sheltered from the dangers of the world. Out here, protection came in the form of fast running or fast shooting or both. Kaylee couldn't allow her father to shield her as he once had.
"I can shoot. I'll sit with her," came Emma's grumbled voice, her head already tucked in her sleeping bag.
"No, I can-" Nick started but Quinton cut him off.
"You just took pain medicine, and they've had more sleep than the rest of us. They'll be fine."
Kaylee heard the rustle of a sleeping bag and when she turned, her father's back was to them. It was his good side, and she knew that, but guilt spiraled through her regardless. She shut her eyes and lay back, letting the darkness of sleep take her and succumbing to a swirl of red dots, Jack's piercing gaze, and her father's turned back.
~
It felt like only moments that she was asleep before someone was shaking her awake.
"Jack?" She murmured, pushing her blonde hair out of her eyes and looking up.
"No, it's me," came Emma's voice. Kaylee nodded and sat up. She could see movement in the corner of the barn in which Jack had put his sleeping bag. She had given him no reason to wake her up himself, she knew that, but it stung that he didn't.
Emma sat in the open loft door, her feet already swinging over the side through the darkness.
"Don't do anything stupid. Like fall," Kaylee whispered, coming to sit beside her sister. Emma pulled a face, but moments later the blanket she had over her lap was thrown over Kaylee's legs too.
The night sky was smudged with clouds, dimming the stars. It was cold, but not horribly uncomfortable. The air was fresh and crisp and Kaylee felt awake, more so than she had in days.
"So, what's up with you and Jack?" Emma blurted out in a whisper. Kaylee stiffened.
"I don't know what-"
"Save it, Kay. I'm not stupid. You haven't talked to him since we left the city, I've noticed."
She sometimes forgot how annoyingly observant Emma was. But what she couldn't tell their father, now she didn't want to tell Emma. Her sister had written their mother off as dead years ago, had told Kaylee, yelled it at her on occasion, that Susan was dead and that the body walking the streets was not their mother. Kaylee never believed that to be the truth. Their mother was sick, horribly sick, but still living. At least, she had been. So how could she grieve with her sister? Emma wouldn't understand. Kaylee couldn't stand to hear her taunts and see her rolling her eyes. So instead, she said nothing.
She kept her eyes trained to the sky, staring into that dusky blackness for all she was worth, wondering which stars she might see if the clouds would only shift to give her something to look at.
"So, is Andrew back in play then? If you and Jack-"
"Emma, no!" Kaylee admonished, shooting her sister a dirty look. She looked over her shoulder at the sleeping masses behind her. She couldn't pick out individual features, just lumpy shapes in sleeping bags. "Do you really think I could just switch them out? Besides, I don't love Andrew like that."
"So, you love Jack?"
Kaylee stiffened, felt a spasm in her fingers, but she clamped her mouth shut.
"You could tell me, you know," came Emma's soft voice. Kaylee didn't respond but Emma pushed regardless. "Something must have happened when you ran after them, right? When you ran into the city 'cause you saw those dogs. Did something happen? Someone get hurt? Was it Jack? Or... or you?"
Kaylee saw, from the corner of her eye, Emma's hand outstretch, reaching for her sister. But something stopped her, her fingers hovered mid air, in the gap between them, and then she squeezed them into a fist and dropped her hand back in her lap, as though she thought better of it. Kaylee frowned. That action, combined with the hesitancy and softness of Emma's voice, affected her.
"You can touch me, you know," Kaylee whispered. "It doesn't scare me." She reached out and pulled at her sisters fingers, wrapping her hand around them.
"It should," Emma said, but she didn't pull away and her hand gripped Kaylee's tightly. "Sometimes I think I shouldn't even be here with-"
"Knock it off!" Kaylee hissed. "And don't let Andrew catch you saying that."
"Andrew!" Emma huffed, sniffing. "I could sneeze, blow my nose, accidentally use a fork and wipe out the lot of you. It's ridiculous. If it weren't for the fact I know Andrew and Dad and you would probably get yourselves killed trying to find me, I'd be gone by now."
"I hate it when you talk like that," Kaylee whispered, more because she knew how true it was than anything else. Emma just shrugged. If they would have let her, Emma would have been gone a long time ago. She tried to leave just after she was bit, before they even knew she wouldn't show any signs of infection. If it weren't for Andrew tackling her to the garage floor in the firehouse she would have thrown herself to the infected and let them devour her.
"So is that it? When you ran into the city," Emma pushed, "did someone get hurt?"
Kaylee sighed, her throat squeezed uncomfortably and a red dot blinked in her periphery. "Yes, Em, someone got hurt."
"But not you or Jack or Andrew?"
Kaylee shook her head. "Not us."
"So Mom then." Emma said it softly, a statement, not a question, and with absolutely no trace of judgement. She didn't rush to offer condolences but her grip on Kaylee's hand didn't shift either, she held just as tight. And her eyes weren't rolling in exasperation. In fact, when Kaylee finally chanced a look at her sister, she saw a sad understanding there.
They didn't speak for a long time, so long that the early light of dawn was stretching across the sky. Kaylee's fingers were stiff from where they were wrapped around her sister's, but the pressure was a good and constant companion and neither girl wanted to let it go.
When Emma finally spoke, the words came slowly, as though she had spent the whole night stringing them together in her head so they would come out right.
"I lost Mom two years ago. You know how I felt about it, and I know you and Dad didn't agree. But when I saw her that first time, after we got out of that apartment building, that first day that her body stumbled into the street, I knew then that she wasn't coming back. And not 'cause she didn't want to, because she physically couldn't. Which in my head, then and now, is the same as any physical death. Her mind, the one that loved me with every part of it, it wasn't there anymore. But it's more than that, I think. The way they act? You can't have a soul and do those things; you can't be human."<
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Emma paused and took a deep breath of the morning air. And Kaylee said nothing, knowing it was hard for her sister to share this and, in truth, shocked that she was.
"But I grieved for her, Kay, the same as if she had a funeral. I sat in that living room there for hours after everyone went to sleep and I stared at her and I said goodbye."
Kaylee watched her little sister's eyes get glassy with tears and she realized now how very alone a fourteen-year-old Emma had been. The only one in a small living room, a room she would hate for the next two years and avoid at all costs, grieving for her mother completely on her own while her big sister and father slept away upstairs. Kaylee had always chastised her for saying derogatory things about their mother as she roamed, moaning in the street. But what made Kaylee right? Maybe their mother really was lost to them the second she was bit, maybe some part of her, the most important part, had died and found peace and it was only the earthly shell that had remained. What made Kaylee right and Emma wrong? One thing Kaylee knew for certain, she had been wrong to dismiss Emma's feelings so entirely, to ignore them, blinded by vague hope, to the point that her sister had to essentially bury their mother completely by herself.
"Em-"
"I just wanted to say that I get it. I know what it is to feel like you're the only one dealing with something, to feel like no one else could possibly understand where you're coming from. But I've been where you are now. I've done this on my own. I wanted you to know that you didn't have to."
Tears threatened and Kaylee set her jaw to hold them at bay. She inhaled sharply, holding tight to her sister's hand and her words. Emma pulled on her fingers and Kaylee let her head drop to her shoulder. She cried. They were the first real tears she had shed for their mother and she didn't hold them back as they flowed into her sister's jacket.
"It was Jack," Kaylee whispered not long after. She knew she didn't have much time and she had to tell her sister the rest, tell her how it had happened. "He did it to save me and he didn't know. How could he? But it was him who shot her. And I can't look at him the same way since."
Emma didn't answer. She put her arm around Kaylee and squeezed though, and Kaylee thought maybe her sister didn't think she was the most terrible person in the world for not talking to Jack yet.
Kaylee pulled her hand from Emma's and reached into her pocket to extract the St. Jude's medal, her thumb automatically tracing the grooves. She held out her palm, the little metal disc unmistakable even in the dim light. She could feel Emma's steady breathing as her sister looked at the innocent medal. She didn't say a word, knowing without explanation what it was and where it came from.
Her hand covered Kaylee's, trapping the medal between them. She squeezed tight and held.
The sun rose, bright and unavoidable, and with it a new day. Long shadows stretched and grew and then fell away, as did the silence. Birds awoke, animals chattered, and behind two girls still clinging tightly to one another, the rest of their group began to stir.
Chapter Three
They didn't stay in one place long. Their path was still ultimately towards Alaska, but it was in no way direct.
It was a bumpy ride. Pits and potholes had erupted over the past two years and with no one left to tend to them, they had grown larger and deeper. Cracks, fissures, old car parts from old wrecks, debris: it all littered the highways. More than once they had to stop, get out of the vehicles, and clear the road while Nick or Anna or Emma guarded from the roof of the motorhome. A few times they had to double back, find a better route. Once due to a bridge collapse and other times because trees had fallen, whether from storms or old age, and blocked the road entirely. They didn't have a chainsaw. To chop through that much tree with only a few axes would have taken days, and wasn't worth it.
But even the clearest roads were rough going. Even if the branches in their way could be driven over and the leaves that had drifted and settled after so much time wouldn't stop them entirely, they added to the broken, choppy pavement and each turn of the tire popped and hissed with the crushing of debris underneath.
It was ideal driving conditions for thought, as no one was talking much, whether due to the noise of driving over all the garbage, or fear of biting through their tongue at every pothole.
That suited Kaylee perfectly.
There weren't that many infected out of the city. The biggest problem seemed to be the debris littering the roadway. It was strange, waking to the sounds of birds and not the sounds of hunger. Kaylee didn't think it could be like this, free and open. Although, she remembered with a pang, Jack had told her it was like this, that first morning they ate oatmeal together out on the roof of the old firehouse. They drove with the windows down, the breeze blowing through and tangling her hair. Autumn was firming it's grasp on the trees, the green fading daily, replaced with the burning orange and reds of fall. The leaves fell like rain, rising in the wake of the motorhome and scattering to the fields surrounding the empty roads.
The fields turned to forests, forests to meadows, the landscape rolling and changing each day they pushed north.
"They're pulling over," Andrew announced, looking from the dusty windshield to the map he held in his hands. Kaylee couldn't see anything but trees surrounding them. "Not much around here."
"Maybe that's the point," Nick said. Even though the road had been rough, the break from manual labor had seemed to help her father. Anna had been diligent about his injury, checking, changing his bandage, feeding him pills. The result was better than Kaylee had hoped for, their father was slowly coming back to them. Away from the city and from the constant press of the infected, he was almost the man she remembered.
Kaylee came to stand behind Andrew, looking at the brake lights of Jack's Hummer as he eased it to a stop. She watched Emma jump out of the passenger seat and walk toward the motor home. She waved for Andrew to lower his window.
"We're gonna set up camp here for a day or so," she told them. "Jack thinks he can get some hunting done."
"Hunting?" Nick asked. Kaylee watched her father perk up at the idea. "Might like to try that with him."
It would be nice to be free of the motor home. The rest of the group had been shifting around, each taking a turn in the different vehicles, all except Kaylee, her father, and Anna. Her father needed the bed in the motorhome and when Anna wasn't driving, she was watching over him. Emma ditched them quickly, claiming boredom, and rotated easily between the tanker with Quinton, and Jack's Hummer. Bill and Andrew shifted around just as much. But Kaylee had yet to jump in with Jack or Quinton, the first because she just couldn't, and the second because she didn't want to make it so obvious that she was avoiding the first. She covered it easily enough, claiming to want to stay with her father and eventually offering to drive the motor home when Anna needed a break.
When she had first offered, her father had vehemently refused, shaking his head in protest. Anna had eyed her though, finally asking, "Do you know how to drive?"
It was a fair question, before the infection she wasn't old enough for a driver's permit, and once she was there was no where to get one. She had shrugged, offering a wry grin. "Sure. I mean, conceptually."
Her father had spluttered but she saw the grin break through on Anna's face and was behind the wheel as soon as Nick fell asleep. It wasn't that hard. She did know how to drive, she had just never needed to before. And though the motorhome was larger than what she would have ideally liked to practice with, necessity made her overcome that particular problem without much difficulty.
"Oh, thank goodness," Anna murmured as she jumped down from the motor home. Kaylee followed her line of sight and sighed gratefully. The asphalt road traveled over a short bridge, not much of a bridge really, just a drainage pipe running underneath the road, the pipe barely big enough for Kaylee to crawl through. Guard rails, rusty and dented, protected other non existent cars from toppling over the side and into what lay beneath. A small, bubbling brook was gushing around roots and moss covered stones. It fl
owed from the surrounding forest, through the pipe, and down and through the oak and pine and beech trees that spanned as far as Kaylee could see. The firehouse might not have had many modern conveniences, but a decent supply of rainwater that they could use to bathe was one of them. Kaylee felt disgusting after a few days without showering.
"Ladies first applies, right?" Emma asked, speaking to no one in particular as she stared longingly at the quick flowing water.
"And that would apply to you how?" Andrew asked, smirking over at her.
"Oh ha, ha," Emma snorted. She had a duffle bag over her shoulder and she hopped over the guard rail, landing on the mossy stones below before tossing her stuff on the shore. "Go hunt or something, I'm hungry."
Andrew grinned and tossed his bag over the bridge, smacking Emma in the back. She shouted back up at him. "Hey!"
"Make yourself useful and set up camp," he said, "while us men get your food."
Emma grunted in return, but she did set his bag next to hers.
"We have a few hours before dark. It'd be a good idea to get some hunting in, might get a rabbit or two at least," Jack said. He strolled up towards Kaylee, hands shoved in his pocket, not quite meeting her eyes.
"Mind some company?" Nick asked, coming out of the motor home behind Kaylee. He was walking on his own, though limping. Anna had confided that the limp might never fully go away. But it didn't matter so much, he could still jog if he needed to.
"Sounds good," Jack said, smiling politely. He had a couple of rifles shouldered and his backpack in one hand. Kaylee gestured at the bag.
