Autumn

It smelt weird. I knew that was a really, really stupid thing to complain about, considering all of the other things there were to be bothered by, but the smell was what got to me. Smoke, rot, sewer, garbage, you name it you can smell it in the Boston Quarantine Zone. I missed the fresh air of the outdoors. Even though we could technically go outside, it felt restricted. Tight. The walls and the soldiers, the duties and the curfews, it was all so confining.

I was worried I would forget what it was like otherwise. It had been eight years of living here, eight years in this completely different world. Whenever I would see kids, it would hit me like a ton of bricks – they never knew what things were like before. This was just how their lives were. They had never known what if felt like to just be fucking safe. To not have to worry about infection, about ration cards, or brutality of the soldiers. That was another rattling thing. It kind of put it all in perspective, of how long it was taking for us to "fix" this. It wasn't getting fixed.

Everything felt flimsy in the Q.Z, like every piece of information you got was just propaganda from the soldiers. It was something about their brisk attitudes that just made them seem like machines, not people. Their lack of humanity also added to that effect. I swear, it was like as soon as you gave them a fucking badge all of their morals were flung out the window.

To put it briefly, life there was far from ideal. But I wasn't an idiot. I knew it was better than outside the walls. There weren't any infected in here, which was something I knew a lot of people couldn't say about their homes. I had heard of other not holding up – they just fell apart after a while from something or other, got overrun. Which wasn't reassuring.

It was dumb. I knew it was really dumb. But I would go outside sometimes. There were tunnels and stuff in the broken down apartments we got to live in, the soldiers didn't know about them because they wouldn't go in there unless someone made a fuss. I just wanted to see something green instead of just various shades of grey and brown. I wanted to breathe in fresh air and see a clear sky, with clouds and shit, not smoke. I wanted to hear birds singing and then get mad because birds still lived their lives like before – everything was normal to them. I wanted to question my weird train of thought, relax, then realize just how much danger I was in and quickly go back.

I wouldn't go alone, I wasn't that brave. No, I'd take Red with me. I felt like she knew what she was doing way more than I did, despite the fact she was younger than me by two or three years.

That's what we were doing one day, heading out just for shits and giggles again, when whether we knew it or not, things started to change for the both of us.

"Watch your head." She told me as she ducked under a large, partially collapsed beam. Sunlight shone through the cracks in the cement above our heads and made everything around us glow with an eerily scarce light.

I sighed slightly, "You say that every time, I'm not stupid you know." Her only response to that was a scoff. I rolled my eyes to myself.

Red tended to take point on these little ventures, I think it was a subconscious thing for her. She was pretty protective of me, either that or she was just convinced I'd die otherwise. Regardless, it was mildly appreciated.

She pushed aside the metal office desk we had placed against the hole to the outside and took a step out into the fresh air. Although she usually acted like it was a chore escorting me like this, I knew she enjoyed it just as much as I did. It was hard not to. She would never admit it though, that wasn't very Red-like. She didn't have to, I knew her enough to see through her like glass. She'd deny that too. I emerged from the stuffy abandoned building as well, inhaling deeply, feeling like my lungs were being cleansed immediately.

We were on the fifth or sixth floor of an old skyscraper. It had been split down the middle from the bombs, and we were looking out from the side that had no walls. From here we could see quite a bit of patchy, ruined skyline. It was odd, especially since I had been around when it was intact. Red had too, but she was from like Georgia or something, not New England. She wasn't as used to urban settings and I consistently made fun of her for it. She was a hick, and her small little accent that would show up in a few of her words would just remind me of that.

I proceeded forward and sat on the edge of the surprisingly sturdy crumbled floor, staring out in the distance. The sky was starting to turn a pinkish orange, the sun dipping just a bit out of sight to our left. She joined me at my side with an "oomph". I noticed she had her pistol out and held loosely in her hand. Mine was securely tucked in my back belt loop. Red was ever the cautious one.

She took another deep, audible breath before slowly speaking, "Wonder what it is that makes this air feel so much goddamn different than the shit back there." She picked up a piece of rubble from her side and tossed it in the distance, somehow managing to make it land in a small puddle. I whistled at her aim and she laughed lightly.

"Show off." I mumbled under my breath. She lightly punched my arm and I feigned genuine injury, which she just rolled her eyes at. I looked back at our surroundings and focused more on the sun's position, "So are we facing... south?"

"North." She corrected me immediately.

I looked at her with an amused expression, "That response was way too fast, what are you a fucking compass?"

"What are you, in third grade? Who doesn't know which way the sun sets?" She fiddled slightly with her gun, flicking the safety on and off. If anyone else did that it'd make me nervous, but she knew what she was doing.

I gasped at her remark, "Hey, fuck you! I'll have you know I'm a proud high school graduate, thank you very much!" A pang of something shot through my chest at the realization that those credentials actually might be considered impressive nowadays.

"Yeah well you're lookin' at a college graduate right here." Her voice was hollow.

I scoffed at her in disbelief, "Bullshit, for what? Gun familiarity? Pebble throwing? Swearing articulation?" She shot me a brief look that clearly showed my sass wasn't appreciated, but I was genuinely curious.

She grumbled something incoherent under her breath before actually answering me, "I've got an Associates in Art." I could see a blush coming to her cheeks because she knew how much I was going to freak out over that.

"What?! Since when are you an artist?!" I turned to face her completely, noting the color in her cheeks and poking one with my index finger – prompting her to slap my hand away though a smile came to her face, "Awh, is Red turning red?"

"I will throw you from this building." She said, finally meeting my eyes, "Don't test me." I actually believed her, to an extent.

"Oh, why don't you paint me a fucking watercolor landscape while you're at it, van Gogh?" I nudged her with my elbow and she just blushed even more. It was weird to see her like this, she looked... younger than normal. More immature. It was odd to think of then, but she was only like, twenty-eight or something. That was young.

She shouldn't be the way she was – hardened, gruff. She should be out there doing stupid shit, getting drunk at clubs and making terrible decisions. But instead she was here, with me, in a broken in half high-rise staring out at the destroyed city, in a world full of fungi consumed maniacs that used to be people and that could be us. The smile slid slowly from my face. She didn't seem to notice.

"Will you shut the fuck up already? Jesus I never should've told you that." She fiddled with the bracelet on her wrist, a nervous habit of hers – one of the few I could detect.

I shook my head back and forth slightly, returning to reality and the conversation, "No no, I'm glad you did. Now I know who to go to when I need a caricature of a clicker drawn." Mentioning a clicker made the air shift just a bit. Hell, mentioning anything about the infected made things different. Sort of shoved you brutally straight back into the real world. She experienced the same thing, I could tell .

She emit a drawn out sigh, looking away from me, before speaking slowly, "We can't keep doin' this, Colleen." Her voice was low, quiet, but had the usual Red-like firmness I had grown oh so accustomed to.

My eyes drifted to my feet that dangled off the ledge we were on, tracing the patterns on the laces of my boots, knowing what she was talking about without needing to ask, "And why's that?" I knew why. There were a dozen reasons why. I just didn't want to give this up.

I could basically feel her frustration emanating off of her in tangible waves, "You know damn well why. Shit's gettin' tighter around here and I can't keep coverin' your ass forever. I have connections, yeah, and people owe me some favors, but that shit runs out eventually, okay?" I knew she had to do some stuff to keep people quiet around here. That was evident.

She was a smuggler, too. Helped people get stuff from outside the walls if they needed it. That was a dangerous job. You could get caught by soldiers, shot, infected, the dangers of it were innumerable, but the compensation was usually well worth it. The soldiers were ridiculously stingy with ration cards, we were all nearly starving. Red kept me going with hers, she had a lot, and she was the only one there that gave a rat's ass about what happened to me. I owed her my life a hundred times over.

She had to pay people off pretty frequently, both to keep her smuggling on the down low, and to not report our sneaking out like this. Other people did it, but those people were a bit more threatening. Their way of paying off was breaking your fingers or shoving a gun barrel against your forehead, which was equally as effective, but Red didn't run that way. Not to say she wasn't brutal, because she definitely could be. Just not with this sort of thing. I guess she was running low on bribes. She hadn't told me.

"Why didn't you say anything...?" My voice was floaty. Light. Like if a particularly strong breeze came along, it'd blow my words away and she wouldn't be able to hear them.

She tucked some of her red hair behind her ear, "Didn't think ya cared. As long as you can get your precious outdoorsy time, what's it matter what Red's gotta do, right?" Her accent was coming on stronger than usual. It did that when she was emotional. Which was rare.

I turned to look at her fully but she wouldn't match my gaze, seeming to be extremely interested in the ruins in the distance all of a sudden. What she said made my chest feel hollow.

"You think I don't care about what you do for me?" The sounds of birds chirping could be heard somewhere nearby. It didn't fit this conversation right now. Normally they would've relaxed me, now I just got mad because of their freedom. Because of their normality.

Nothing was said for a while. Her jaw set and she looked down, anywhere that wasn't at me, really. Then she stood up, walking slightly away from me, back now turned with her arms crossed. I got to my feet too, wondering what was up her ass that day in particular. We didn't fight. This was odd, foreign and unwanted. It seemed to come out of nowhere too.

"No... no, it's just..." She dug her hand into her hair. This was unlike her, this uncertainty so clearly felt in the air. She was always so solid and sure of herself. I didn't like this.

"What? What's going on, Red?" I asked, my voice really, really sincere for the first time in a while now. I took a few steps forward.

She took a very shaky breath, putting her hands on her hips and tilting her head up at the ceiling for a moment, "It's getting... really bad, Colleen."

I waited for her to elaborate, but she didn't. For some reason this was clearly difficult for her to talk about, which had never happened before, "...What is? The bribes? Red, look, we don't have to-"

"-No, not the fucking bribes." She turned around to face me, glaring slightly. I knew she wasn't mad at me, but Jesus Christ if looks could kill. It faded in a few lingering seconds, though, the anger fell right from her face and was replaced with what I might call loss, "...The world."