Because I'm happy
Clap along if you feel like a room without a roof
Because I'm happy
Clap along if you feel like happiness is the truth
"I can't listen to this."
I reach forward from the back seat and turn the car's radio off, although it's not actually the radio that's playing this sickeningly optimistic music, but the built-in CD player that's playing one of Armin's terrible albums. If you flick through the radio stations, each one, wherever you are, you won't find a single one that still broadcasts something other than white noise. There are no radio stations left; they're all either abandoned or destroyed. I doubt there's a radio presenter left either, at least not one with conscious thoughts and any control over their diet.
Mikasa doesn't hit my hand away or tell me to put the music back on. Maybe she would've four months ago. Four months ago she'd probably have told me some happy music would do us all good, lift our spirits a bit.
I don't think we have spirits left to lift.
Instead she gives me a look with an emotion that somewhat resembles sympathy, while still concentrating on the road even though we're probably the only people here within miles. Mikasa and Armin don't trust me to drive and I don't blame them. I couldn't pass my driving test when I turned seventeen and I doubt I'd be able to now, at the age of eighteen, without a driving instructor that wouldn't eat my flesh as I fastened my seatbelt.
Not even Armin debates as I turn the music off, which he usually would have, considering he used to adore cheesy, uplifting music like that, but the days where we could pop our earphones in and relax without fearing for our lives are long gone. Those days are faint memories that are lost in the past. Things have changed since then.
If I was being optimistic I'd say there must be people other than us out there somewhere. Hell, that's why we're trying to get to Safehouse 104. But optimism won't get us far in a world where three teenagers are travelling across the country to get to a place that may not exist. Optimism isn't going to stop us from having to worry about our lives for every minute that we live them. By now we've learned to live day to day, and any kind of future is an ambitious idea to say the least, especially one with all three of us. We have to face the facts now, and the facts are that humans are in the minority, and the majority is terrifying. The majority is made of monsters, rabid creatures that wouldn't hesitate in killing and eating their best friends, lovers, family.
We're living alone. We're living on the edge. We're living one bite away from dying and then turning into these disgusting, fucked up versions of humans. Sometimes it feels like we're not living at all.
Zombies. It sounds kind of stupid, but really terrifying at the same time, like something you'd read in a children's book then have nightmares about that same night. Now they're not just in a kid's bad dreams. I'd rather have dreams about them every night for the rest of my life than have to face them in real life for one more day. Facing them, killing them; that's what we've been doing for four months.
It started with news reports about countries in Europe, Asia, nowhere near us on the coast of Oregon, USA. Some believed the reports but they were few and far between. Unrealistic. Probably a conspiracy.
Maybe not, after all.
Then came the reports about zombies up in Canada, only a country away. We were still dubious about them but once we saw the video footage of these things that couldn't be described as people or even animals but as shadows of humans, sinking rotten teeth into the flesh of screaming victims, some of which were innocent children like what Armin, Mikasa and I were not too long ago, the possibility of these zombies being real became a bit more likely. Still, it wouldn't affect our lives, right?
Wrong.
I've been best friends with Mikasa and Armin for my entire life, and our parents were all close, too. We were eating out one night in a restaurant we all went to regularly and loved.
My mum only said she was going to the bathroom to put some lipstick on.
The last I can remember of my mum is a friendly, gentle smile and the faint smell of her perfume. It smelt like a florist in the spring and more importantly it smelt of her.
What came back from the bathroom wasn't my mum. What came back was a twisted version of the woman who'd raised me and been there for me throughout my entire short life. A horrible mutant, not her but it, with a chunk of flesh missing at its neck and grey skin that looked filthy, like something my mother would've told me to clean. It was drowned in blood as bright as the perfectly manicured nails at the end of the arms it held out.
The eyes were what terrified me the most. My father was a doctor and he told me once that in his work, he noticed that the most obvious sign of consciousness was in the patient's eyes, other than the breathing, obviously. When the body was incapable of doing any more than healing itself, what you looked for was a sign of humanity in the eyes.
My mother's eyes were dead, and I didn't think that body – what should have been her body – was going to heal itself.
Mikasa was more prepared than any of us. She pulled Armin and I out of the way of whatever was left of my mum before we could freeze in panic. We ran for our lives, quite literally. Our parents weren't so lucky. Seeing six adults I'd grown up around turn into zombies after dying brutal deaths was an experience that I didn't want to remember, yet it seems to be inerasable from my mind.
We watched this warped disease spread around the town, incapable of doing anything to stop it. Aunts and uncles and cousins succumbed to it. Grandparents. Teachers, school friends, those that we used to pass on the street, and wave and say hello to because we vaguely knew them, all became undead. Everyone and everything we took for granted is now gone.
It became too dangerous to live all alone in the house I grew up in, so Armin and I moved in with Mikasa, but it slowly started to get unbearable to live there, as three teenagers that should be finishing our school years and preparing for college, not fearing death more than we loved living. Armin was the cleverest person I knew and Mikasa was a whiz kid with technology, and with their combined efforts they stumbled upon a radio station that was still on air. That's where we heard about Safehouse 104, which was apparently in New York. It took a long time to get prepared to travel on a long journey to get there, but a few days ago, in mid-January, we set off.
We're in Nebraska.
Mikasa is driving. She's concentrating fully on the road now, hands gripping the steering wheel and eyes narrowed. Before we left home, or what remained of it, she cut her hair short. Her mouth is hidden behind the red scarf I gave her for Christmas a long time ago. She's been driving for four hours, and Armin drove before her for about eight hours. Armin himself is half-asleep in the front seat, long blond hair pulled out of its ponytail for him to put his head back. We'll stop for the night in a few hours, probably.
The only things to look at out of the window I rest my head against are fields and abandoned cars. Oh, and a shitload of rotting corpses that have bee n here for so long that I can't tell whether they were once alive or undead. Driving over them is enough to make me feel sick.
We leave the highway and find ourselves in a town that looks as abandoned as every other town we've driven through. Each house we pass has barricaded doors and windows, but even from that there's still no guarantee that there are people living inside. The town looks pretty much dead.
"Wait, stop," Armin orders suddenly, snapping out of his state of semi-consciousness. Mikasa puts her foot on the brake and we both look at Armin to find out why the hell he's so interested in a deserted Nebraskan town. "There's a store over there."
"There are stores all over the country, Armin," I say.
"No, Eren, look." He points at a music store, windows lined with guitars that have mostly fallen off their stands, at the end of the street. I squint at it and notice why he made Mikasa stop the car.
"The lights are on," I frown.
"That could mean anything," Mikasa says dismissively as she starts to drive again. "Someone could've left them on before, you know, being brutally murdered by a zombie and then turning into one, like what could happen to us if we go in there."
"Thanks for that positive thought," I mutter.
"Look how the door's open," Armin tells us, ignoring Mikasa's idea that in truth is quite likely to happen. "It's propped open by something. A zombie would trip over it, so the last person that's been in or out of there is probably human."
Mikasa stops the car again, right outside the shop. "Armin's probably right," I shrug.
"Armin's always right." Mikasa sighs before patting our blond friend lightly on the head. She undoes her seatbelt then reaches behind her to grab the axe that sits next to me in the back of the car. It's funny what you can find when you raid old people's houses.
"Why do you get the axe?" I ask. "Why am I always stuck with the baseball bat?"
"Because you'd probably accidentally chop your head off, Eren." She looks between Armin and I. "Are we going to do this, then?"
"Wait, we're going in there?" I almost start to panic. "After you reminded us of the possibility of us dying if we do exactly that?"
"I'd rather be stuck in a group of four or five terrified people than a group of three."
"Are you saying we're not good enough for you?" I demand, but Mikasa ignores me and opens the car door.
"We should cover her," Armin murmurs as Mikasa steps out of the car.
"No, we should be fighting at her side," I snap. Armin looks at me with one eyebrow raised. "Okay, yeah, we should cover her."
With a baseball bat in my hand and a gun in Armin's – I still don't understand why they don't trust me with a gun, there's not an extremely high possibility I'd accidentally shoot one of us – we follow Mikasa, who locks the car over her shoulder with its key before I can pretend to be observant and tell her to do so. Slowly, as quietly as possible, Mikasa pushes the door of the store open, kicking the amplifier that props it open away.
Instruments of all kind that once hung up on the walls are now on the floor, most of them splattered in blood. We start to look around in every corner for a sign of life or lack of it, and I stop to look at the only guitar that still hangs on the wall. It's a Fender Telecaster. I run my finger along the neck and mutter, "What a waste of a perfectly good instrument."
I feel a hand close around my wrist and nearly jump out of my skin before turning around and realising the hand belongs to Armin. His eyes are wide in panic and he silently drags me to the corner of the room, behind a stand with tons of identical piano books, where Mikasa is already hiding.
"What the hell –" I begin, but Mikasa clamps her hand across my mouth before another word escapes from it. I brush her hand away and lean over just enough to see what I've apparently missed once again. Behind the counter where stacks of guitar tuners and plectrums have been knocked over, a door is propped open, like the first one we came through.
"Found anything?" A loud voice asks from somewhere deeper in the shop. It sounds like a man.
"There's rice here," A lower voice replies, probably also a man. "And it smells pretty good, too."
"I didn't know rice had a smell," The first man says.
"Of course rice has a smell –" He abruptly stops.
"What?" Another man asks, sounding slightly irritated.
"I can smell something else."
"You can always smell something, Mike."
"Smells like people."
Armin glances at me, alarmed. Mikasa is trying to stay calm but her breathing is a bit quicker than before.
"Dead people or real people?" Another voice. This time, a girl.
"Real people," Mike replies.
"Well, this'll be fun," The annoyed, unenthusiastic guy comments.
My heart is in my throat.
The first person to emerge from behind the door is a tall man with a rifle held in his hands and not a single blond hair out of place. Behind the display of books, we hold our breath.
The next one out is another man, taller, with hair slightly darker than the first man and a shotgun. Two grown men are pointing guns vaguely in our direction and I'm terrified.
I feel Armin's hand on mine and I squeeze it tightly. "We'll be fine," I breathe, although I'm really not sure we will be. I look quickly at one of my two best friends and see that he's not actually looking me, but if his brain was a machine which it practically is, it'd be overheating with how attentively he's concentrating. I try to think like Armin does, but only he's capable of that.
Both men walk around the counter and slowly around the store. The blond one looks at the tallest one inquisitively. "Someone's here," The tallest one mutters. He must be Mike.
Before I know it a woman has jumped over the counter. She has brown hair tied up at the back of her head, and stands of it fall over her glasses. I don't know if the multicoloured tattoos that cover most of her body are scarier than the wild, slightly insane grin on her face. "Never doubt Mike's nose," She says in the most enthusiastic voice I've heard in the last four months.
I look at Mikasa, expecting her to give us some silent instructions, but she does nothing. If Mikasa and Armin don't know what to do, we're probably fucked.
When I look back at the scene that's developing in front of us, my stomach flips in the most unexpected way. The last guy, who has black hair and looks quite short although definitely not someone I'd like to mess with, is sitting on the counter, scowling down at what I think is a pistol in his tattooed hand. Every inch of his arms boasts tattoos, like the girl's but not as colourful, over pretty damn impressive muscles. I realised I was gay back in seventh grade and, well, he's hot.
"I don't know if any of you idiots have noticed," He says in a low voice without even looking up from the gun in his hand, "but the door we deliberately left open is now closed, so we're definitely not alone."
"Told you not to doubt Mike's nose!" The woman cried.
"I was never doubting Mike's nose," The blond sighed.
The short guy jumps from the counter and crosses the room to where I was no more than two minutes ago, his free hand running along the neck of the Fender Telecaster. The girl takes the gun from his hand. "Hey," She grins. "If you're just going to stand there and just wistfully stare at a guitar, I'd better take this."
"It's not just a guitar," He mutters, rolling his eyes.
Mikasa grips my hand suddenly, and I throw a glance in her direction to see what's wrong. She's looking out of the window. Armin and I follow her gaze.
The corpse of a girl that couldn't have been much older than twelve or thirteen staggers toward the store. Its skin looks like mud and although its eyes are glassy, its mouth is open and full of broken teeth which make me start to wonder how horrifically the poor girl died. It looks feral.
Apparently the three of us are the only ones who have noticed it.
"Did somebody grab the rice?" The girl asks.
"Irvin did," Mike replies.
"Mike did," Says the blond man at the same time. They look at each other in confusion.
"I thought you had it," Mike frowns.
"You were the one that found it," The blond, who I'm guessing is Irvin, argues.
"Yeah, but you're the organised one."
"Sorry to interrupt your little debate," The girl says, glasses shining, "but, actually, I really don't think now is the time to argue about rice."
All three men turn to look at the girl, and then they see the monster that is approaching pretty quickly. There's another thing about zombies: they're not slow, like in the books and the movies. They're surprisingly fast. You can't exactly stroll away from one.
The zombie is pressed against the door now, banging its hands against the glass like a little kid and growling desperately for its next meal. I'm really not liking the idea of being just that.
I nearly knock the display of books over as we watch it fling itself against the door, pushing it open. Before Mikasa can press her hand over my mouth again, bullets are ripping into the creature without hesitation, the sound of them so loud that it feels like I'm the one being shot at. Armin is shaking like he used to when we first became what some may describe to be killers, and my jaw drops in sheer horror.
The zombie is on the floor, blood oozing out of each bullet hole onto the carpet. The bullets cease and the three that hold guns, that aren't even entirely aware of our existence, crowd around the monster on the floor.
"Is it dead?" Asks the only one without a gun, who looks disinterested as he gazes at his friends.
"We didn't get it in the head," Mike notices. He points his gun at the zombie's head but the girl moves between him and the zombie.
"Wait!" She yells. "Don't kill it yet. It's not exactly going anywhere, is it? Just give me a chance to take a look at it, write a few things down, maybe –"
She's abruptly pushed aside by the shortest guy, who is carrying the Fender. Wordlessly he starts to slam the body of the guitar down on the zombie's neck again and again.
And again.
And again.
After about ten seconds, the zombie's head is completely severed from its body.
Now, that is a waste of a perfectly good instrument.
He throws the guitar aside and stomps on the zombie's head for good measure. "It's dead," He states as he looks down at his own clothes, which are splattered in dark, almost black blood. "Disgusting."
The girl sighs hopelessly. "That could have been a brilliant opportunity."
"Oopsies," He says dryly.
"I think we should team up with them," Mikasa whispers.
"What the –" I have to stop myself from shouting. "Heck?"
"Seven is better than three," She replies calmly in the quietest voice possible, her words barely audible. "And they seem pretty tough."
"She wanted to keep a zombie alive!" I hiss. "A zombie! Alive!"
"For good reason," Armin says under his breath. "And 'alive' isn't really the right word. It was never alive in the first place."
"Eren," Mikasa says in the same voice as she may say 'sweetie'. "I saw the way your eyes lit up when you saw the one with the dark hair."
That is undeniable.
Silence falls across the room again, and when I look back at what reminds me of a crime scene on a particularly brutal episode of one of the detective shows we used to watch, I see four pairs of eyes staring right at me.
"Shit," I murmur.
"What?" Mikasa asks.
"They've seen us."
"Stay calm," She instructs us. "We're going to surrender to them."
"No. No way. The girl's fucking crazy! And the short one's just plain dangerous!"
This doesn't convince Mikasa, and Armin looks happy enough to go along with her plan.
We're only a few metres away from the door.
I drag my hands through my hair which really badly needs a cut, and start running for what may be my life.
"Eren!" Mikasa yells, bolting after me. As I sprint through the door and out of the store, I hear Armin yelling "Sorry!" as he follows us, and in any circumstance where I may or may not be shot, I'd stop to laugh.
"Hey, someone fucking get them!" Mike yells as Mikasa unlocks the car and we all jump in.
"Ah, fuck," I say to myself as I realise I'm sitting in the driver's seat.
"Too late, just drive," Mikasa says as she chucks the car key to me, sounding like she wants to swing her axe at me.
"Don't forget your seatbelts!" Armin reminds us as I stick the key in ignition, slam my foot onto what I really hope is the clutch pedal, shift the car into first gear and press my other foot down on one of the other pedals. Now I understand why I never managed to get my driver's license.
The car somehow splutters into action and we drive down the street much faster than one should drive in a small Nebraskan town. I hear car doors slam behind us, and as I peer through the wing mirror, I see a Jeep full of four very angry people.
"Did you see how clean they were?" Armin pipes up again from the back seat, pulling his hair back into a ponytail again. "They must've come from somewhere – some kind of safehouse, maybe – pretty recently."
"So?" I shrug as Mikasa takes it upon herself to put the car in whichever gear it needs to be in. I push the throttle as far down with my foot as it'll go and pretty soon we're driving through unfamiliar, deserted streets much faster than what was once legal.
"They've probably got a lot of supplies with them," Armin continues. "Food and drinks, maybe. Hopefully."
"Hopefully?" I echo. "You're not still planning on teaming up with these weirdos?"
"Better safe than sorry," Mikasa mutters.
I give her an apologetic look. "I'm sorry. I panicked." I check the rear-view mirror and see the silver Jeep following us, although it's being driven much better than I'm capable of.
"Turn here."
"What?"
Mikasa leans over and turns the steering wheel. "Keep your foot down," She instructs from behind her scarf. I do exactly as she tells me, and after a few excruciatingly sharp turns during which the world blurs, we're on the highway.
The Jeep is still behind us.
"Just fucking drive!" Mikasa yells in a momentary loss of control, and I keep my foot down as my hands tremble on the steering wheel. The speedometer is telling me that we're driving at fifty, fifty-one, fifty-two miles per hour, and I'm not sure if that's more petrifying than the bullets that have started flying from behind us, hitting the road either side of us. Once more I glance at the mirror as I swerve the car wildly in an attempt to avoid getting shot, and I see the brunette girl and the guy who brutally destroyed one of my favourite guitars, hanging out of the back windows with two handguns in each hand.
"We're screwed!" I squeak. Sixty-five miles per hour.
"They're not shooting at us," Armin says from the back seat as he looks through the rear window, ducking down as if he doesn't believe his own words. "They're shooting at the wheels."
"Oh, great!" I exclaim. Seventy-two miles per hour. "They don't want to kill us quickly. They want to stop us and then shoot us and watch us slowly bleed to death."
Mikasa starts to fumble through the glove box, and then produces a handgun that we usually try to save for necessary occasions, such as when two lunatics are shooting at us with four guns. She quickly winds her window down and then she's amongst the rogue bullets, leaning out of the window, shooting back at our new enemies.
"Get back in the car!" I shout, but either she can't hear me or she completely ignores me.
"Eren, how fast are we going?" Armin asks.
I look at the speedometer. "Uh, eighty."
"That's really dangerous!"
"Yeah, so is this whole situation!" I scream in reply.
"You can blame yourself for that," Mikasa yells.
In a split second I feel one of the wheels burst. Mikasa almost falls back into the car as we skid across four lanes of the highway quicker than what should be scientifically possible. Even though I doubt it'll do much at all, I press down on the brake pedal and pray to whoever thought it was a good idea to put zombies on earth that I'll still be alive after whatever the hell is going to happen to us and the car.
Firstly I see a sky full of stars hiding behind clouds, and although I'm too terribly frightened to cry, I feel a lump of tears form in my throat as I think of the days when we were young kids who spent our nights lying on green grass and pointing out constellations that were probably figments of our imagination.
Next thing I know, we're slamming into a fence and I think to myself that maybe my prayers were answered, because somehow, as the windows around us shatter and the wood of the fence snaps and juts like a sword through the front window that doesn't seem to exist anymore, I don't die. My entire body aches from the sudden impact and the headache I now have is splitting, but I'm not dead.
"Mikasa?" I breathe weakly, gasping for air, but my throat feels thin like a drinking straw. "Armin?"
Two groaning voices respond without any particular words. I try to set aside how much shame I feel after doing something so ridiculously stupid, and try to look at the positives for once.
We're alive.
Car doors are shutting somewhere, a long away, puncturing the silence. Feet pound on the ground, getting closer, then the door directly to my left is thrown open. Two hands are placed on either side of my face and reach up to touch one of them, feeling rough skin.
"Oi, open your eyes."
The words sound fuzzy like I'm underwater, and my eyelids are heavy, and I want to sleep.
"Come on, brat," Says a low voice. "Open your eyes for me."
I force my eyes open. The world is blurred. In front of me is the face of the short, black-haired man with dark tattoos and worry in his eyes that's only barely there. To be honest, it's a face I really don't mind having so close to mine.
"You're a fucking idiot," He growls, and that's almost enough to change my mind.
"You're the one who shot us," I mumble.
"We weren't shooting at you," He replies. "If we were trying to shoot one of your wheels we'd have fucking done it."
"Huh?"
"Never mind. Are you alright?"
I try to nod but the pain that was once all over my body is now settling into specific places: my neck, my legs, my arms. "I'm fine," I try to tell him, but it comes out as no more than a groan.
"I don't think so," He mutters. "What's your name, kid?"
"Eren," I manage to answer.
"Eren," He repeats. It sounds good coming from his mouth, and I have to stop myself from staring too intently at him. "I'm Levi. That's Hanji," He nods at the brunette who is tending to Mikasa on my other side. I hadn't noticed her. "Irvin and Mike are in the car."
"Don't worry, you three, we'll get you fixed up in no time," Hanji grins cheerily. "Well, maybe it'll take a few weeks."
I try to protest, tell them we don't need their help, tell them we've survived this long without anyone other than each other. But those words are too distant, too far out of reach.
"We're on the same side." Levi says as he leans over to undo my seatbelt, before looking back at me as if I'm the only thing in the world that matters right now.
"We're all human," Hanji chips in.
"You're with us now," Levi murmurs, eyes locked on mine. "We're all together."