Louis had forgotten his sunglasses. As the sailboat pulled away from the beach, he cupped his hand over his eyes and observed the movement of the wind through the palms on the shore. Behind the trees were rows of boardwalk stores, intended to attract tourists, and beyond that, hotels. Ultimately, they were not the most ideal places to call home. But that's what it was to them now.
Wearing red track shorts and a huge t-shirt tied and cut to fit her better, Zoey approached him from behind. "How we doing, Louis?" She asked.
"It's great sailing weather!"
"Good. Francis, get off the deck. I almost stepped on you. What the hell do you think you're doing down there, anyway?"
The biker didn't move. "Trying to cool off, Zoey. In case you haven't noticed, we live in one giant armpit."
With the wind in their favor right now, Louis could let the boat take its' own course. The Florida mainland was a dot in the distance, but they were making good time, and the day was young.
She stepped around Francis and walked to the bow. It was a slender boat, long enough to accommodate them comfortably. Their trip home would be considerably less spacious; they would be returning with cargo. Despite their best efforts to use the resources the keys had provided, after nearly a year, it was getting tougher and tougher to stretch what supplies they still had.
Louis knew Zoey was not keen on the idea of returning, at least not under these circumstances. It was a repeat of the nightmarish bulletfests they had endured during the early weeks of the infection. The plan was to grab what they needed and get out, but it would not be that simple, and it did not come without copious amounts of risk.
He watched her fold her arms and lean onto the siding of the boat, her back to him. The wind moved loose wisps of her hair in feather-like motions around her head. For a second he hesitated, then took a stride over Francis too and joined her, many meters away from prying ears.
"Zoey, you haven't been sleeping well lately, have you?"
"No, not really."
"Why is that?"
Zoey picked at a scab on her wrist. She was very tan and it was making her forearms freckle. "Just… thinking."
"Well, you can confide in me if you need it. You know that, don't you?"
"Thanks, Louis," she said. Her body language told him that the conversation ended there.
Occasionally Louis found himself wishing for the young and stupid college student she had been when they met, if only because she had been much easier to talk to then.
Last summer, just before Bill had died, Zoey had been convinced that running away from what was left of the human race was wrong. Even through being betrayed by CEDA and the military, she clung to the belief that if she turned her back on the apocalypse, the disappearance of the human race would rest on her shoulders; she was angry with Bill when she realized his only goal was to protect himself and his little band of immune survivors.
The night that he passed away, beaten to death by a swarm of giant zombies they called Tanks, Zoey said nothing more about returning to help other survivors, if there were any. Louis had hurt his leg in an unfortunate encounter with a pit of furious zombie Witches, and though he was only able to watch from the sidelines, he remembered everything like it had happened multiple times, which was not far from the truth. It was something he relived frequently.
. . .
He, Francis and Zoey, perched safely on the top of an elevated lift near the bridge; the common infected moaning below them. Dawn was five hours away.
The bridge lifted, thanks to Bill manually restarting the generator. This meant that they could sail a boat from the harbor to the islands in the Keys, just like he had planned. They were safe—safer than they had been in a long time.
Zoey sunk to the ground, dropping her pistols and hiding her face in her arms. Louis was next to her, and he heard her sob a few times, almost inaudibly. He put his hand on her back. She didn't look up. Francis knelt beside her and, in a rare moment of seriousness, shed some tears with them.
"I'm gonna miss that old guy." Francis said slowly.
She straightened and brushed away pieces of hair that stuck to her face. "Bill, you did it. We're safe." Her voice broke. "We're safe."
Louis remembered embracing her for a long time that night—she didn't say much, or even cry after that. Francis kept first watch further up the bridge. None of them were ready to leave behind the final resting place of their leader. For the next two hours, Louis drifted in and out of a surreal sleep, made feverish and unpleasant by the throbbing of his leg. Zoey laid his head in her lap, but she never slept.
Some time later Francis's boots scraping against the ground woke him. "You two. Do you hear that?" He asked.
They listened together. The sound echoed off the walls of the city, making it faint, but unmistakable. "A car!" exclaimed Zoey.
"Other survivors!" Louis said.
Francis was quick to say, "Vampires!"
Zoey and Francis both left Louis and ran to the other end of the bridge, where they stayed for about twenty minutes. They were close enough for him to occasionally hear raised voices. He could tell there was another woman.
When Zoey returned, she looked hopeful. Louis' leg was getting steadily worse, and it hurt him terribly, but he was too curious to let it bother him. "What's going on? How many people are there?"
"There's four of them. They're from Georgia." Zoey crouched to his eye level and beamed, catching the dying moonlight on her teeth. The motion of her eyes made them glint. "They need to drive across the bridge, so Francis and I told them to get around so they could restart the generator."
"What?! Bill lost his life to lower that thing, and we're just gonna reverse it?"
"I told Francis to take the boat through and hold it on the empty pier outside of the harbor. We'll finish the trip after we help them." She inspected his leg, attempting to turn his thigh in the process. A hot pain stabbed through all the way to his bone, spreading like fire through the damaged tissue.
Zoey noticed him wince. The smile on her face vanished. "Oh. This is getting pretty bad. Here, take these."
Louis swallowed three of the ibuprofen, without water. "What are the other survivors like?"
"Well, it's easy to tell that Francis is excited about one of them, at least. She seems nice. But there's some douchey middle-aged Elvis look-alike too. I get the feeling nobody likes him." She began gently tugging off his old bandage while she talked. His fists clenched at his sides, he took it with a grimace and didn't make a sound. "They all kinda operate under this big black guy they called Coach, who was quiet most of the time, and the one driving the car was really young. Maybe my age."
She reached the deepest part of the wound, which had soaked the bandage thoroughly and was not about to surrender it. "This thing isn't coming off readily," she said.
"Just take it off, real fast, okay?"
Zoey pulled as cleanly as she could, but it took a substantial chunk of already-scabbing flesh with it. Louis sucked in a breath and held it until the pain was more bearable. Fresh blood welled up. "Sorry," She whispered.
Her hands touching him as lightly as she could, Zoey continued to tell him about the other group while she wrapped his leg. There was no missing the excitement in her voice. "Ellis talks so fast sometimes I can hardly understand him. And that accent doesn't help. He and Francis hit it off." For a second, she paused, her expression blank. She said quietly, "I hope they make it around."
Louis took her wrist and held it firmly. They were both trembling. Zoey stopped, but she didn't look at him; he knew she must be fighting back tears.
"They can make it, Zoey."
She resumed tending to his wound, still being gentle. "I thought Bill could make it."
He didn't have anything to say. Her work on the bandage was good; it was tight enough to stop the bleeding. Once she was done, she ripped the piece off and tied it.
For a brief moment they looked at each other. Louis wished he could say something to make things better, but Zoey already knew what Bill's death really meant, and the weight of it was like a physical burden on her. She was the defacto leader now.
He remembered watching her stand up, turning in the direction of the keys with a sorrowful, yet determined angle to her eyebrows. Whatever conflict she had held against Bill in his last hours, she never voiced it. Maybe she still believed it was possible to reach out and salvage something from the broken world, but whether it was because she wanted to honor Bill's wish or she was too beaten to try, Zoey never brought it up again.
She retreated to the edge of the bridge where it met the scaffolding of the building next to it. Louis would have liked to have her company, but evidently, she did not want his, so he said nothing to her. Zoey stood, waiting a good 100 meters away from him, her body turned towards the city. The lights from the generator threw her shape into relief. From where Louis sat, she was just a small figure against the dull browns of the old brick structures that made up the coastal town.
With Bill gone, they really were just a ragtag bunch of boys and girls with guns.
The three of them remained separated like that—Zoey on one end of the bridge, Louis sitting alone further down, and Francis so far away that he was no longer visible in the low light—for a long, tense hour.
At last, they heard voices again, this time from the opposite side of the bridge. They were close enough that Louis could hear what they were saying.
"This entire town is so goddamn filthy. 'Under the River Tour'. I think they'd attract more people like Ellis if they just flat out called it 'Swimming in a Dark Shithole as deep as your Nostrils.'"
"Nick, not ever'one in the South enjoys wallowin' in othuh folk's crap, contrar' to whatevuh you seem tuh think." Another deep male voice.
His leg pain distant for the time being, Louis hoisted himself up, relying heavily on the support of the metal railing, and hobbled over to sit against the wall of the ridge that overlooked the generator. Francis came running, too.
Zoey spoke first. "You made it!"
"'Course we did! All present and accounted for." Louis could smell them from up here; they must have really had to wade through the sewers. The boy speaking had a mess of curly, mousey brown hair under a baseball cap. Close behind him was an attractive black woman who looked approximately Louis' age. The butt of the assault rifle she carried was pressed into the boy's back as if he were being coaxed.
Zoey wasn't kidding about the accents; at least two of them were clearly from Georgia.
"If you want to lower the bridge, you'll have to fill those generators and make sure they're running," called Zoey. She sounded happier. "We'll cover you from up here."
The woman noticed Louis. "We didn't see you back there," She commented.
"Yeah, I'm a little banged up. My name's Louis. It's nice to meet you!"
Francis made a point of standing in their line of sight. "Hey, Louis, can't you see the lady is covered in shit? No ladies covered in shit are interested in learning names. Just back away slowly, brother."
The woman smiled smugly. "I'd be pretty interested to know yours," she said.
"Well, since you insist, the name of this man right here standing before you is Francis." He leaned over the rail next to Zoey. "And in case you forget, it's right here on this bicep. You can read it better when I flex, like this."
The man in the white suit interjected. "Francis. No kidding? Your name is Francis?"
Mid-flex, Francis said "Anyone stupid enough to make a crack about the name Francis sounds like he deserves a gun barrel up his butthole. Don't you think so, Zoey?"
"Nick," Said the wide black man from behind the others, "Show some respect. They gonna help us."
Louis said, "You might wanna start filling up the generator before the sun rises. There are more Boomers and Smokers up then."
The boy, presumably Ellis, spoke up again. "Shuuute, you don't know a mornin' zombie 'till ya seen a jockey. Those things are up at the crack a' dawn."
As they sauntered off in search of gas cans, Zoey called after them. "Look out for Tanks!"
Coach acknowledged her with a wave.
The sky was turning a murky color, but usable light was still far off. Louis held a pistol and kept a watchful eye on the other survivors. He wondered if they were as close to each other as he was to his own team. He especially wondered if any of them would sacrifice themselves if the time came.
"Bill would have shot that suit moron." Francis muttered.
Another Tank did show up, near the end. The generator was almost full. So far, all four of the band on the ground had demonstrated a high proficiency in being able to shoot a gun. Ellis seemed to become trigger happy when he knew Zoey was watching.
Even Francis was visibly clutching nervously at his gun as the horde and Tank began to overwhelm the newcomers. Zoey was doing her best to get in headshots, but nothing was easy when it involved Special Infected.
Coach discharged three shotgun rounds into the Tank's back. It roared, furious, and blindly swiped, sending him tumbling across the road. His gun took a different trajectory—right through a parked car's windshield.
"Aw, no," Zoey mouthed, her one eye still trained on something through her scope.
As if it were deliberately drawing attention, the alarm screamed. The faraway howl of a giant horde pierced the dead air.
Nick and Rochelle frantically scrambled to find another gas can as zombies poured into the streets, pushing each other and scaling fences in seconds. Ellis urged Coach to get to his feet. "I'm not leavin' you here, but you gotta git up!" He yelled.
"Louis, pass me that molotov you had!" Francis looked to him expectantly.
He sputtered. "I… I gave that to Bill, remember?"
"No pipe bomb?"
Louis shook his head.
"Bile Jar?"
Again, the answer was no, until he remembered something. "Wait." Louis patted his pant leg, coming up empty, but his shirt pocket held one more surprise; a single incendiary rifle shell.
"Zoey!" He shouted to her over the deafening mixture of noises. "Make it count!"
She popped the cartridge into her weapon, swung around to plant crosshairs on the charging Tank, and pulled the trigger. A second later, the flames began, starting at his shoulder and engulfing rows and rows of rippling muscle. He was as good as gone.
With the generator sufficiently full of fuel, Francis punched the button to lower the bridge. Nick was the first to climb up. Coach and Ellis were last. The older man was bleeding from a shallow wound across the back of his neck, and the blood ran all the way down his back. Rochelle offered him the last bandage in their health kit.
"Thank God you're all okay." Zoey sighed a long, loud sigh. "Your car can get past just fine now."
They talked for many more minutes, all the way past dawn. The light added color to what had been a dreary setting before. Louis noted that this was probably the longest night of his life to date. There was a soreness in him, behind the pain in his leg, that made him slowly relive everything that had happened. The world was gone. His life was changed, and Bill was dead.
But it was nice to make contact with people. It held light to the idea that things might not always be this terrifying.
"Are you sure you don't want to come with us?" Rochelle asked.
Louis smiled at her. "Thanks… really. But we can make it on our own."
They all waved eagerly as the car finally screamed down the bridge, sporting a beaming Ellis from the driver's seat. Louis caught only a glimpse of the other passengers, but it was enough: Nick looking at Francis with amused disgust. Or was it genuine?
As the ripping noises of the engine faded, Louis let his arm drop. "You're right, Francis," he said. "Bill would have shot him."
. . .
The sailboat was nearing the mainland. Gulls circled lazily over their heads, searching for food to scavenge. Francis had fallen asleep in his shady spot under the sail, and Zoey was still quiet, her hair still catching the wind, eyes trained on something beyond what she could see.
Maybe she was thinking the same thing Louis was. Maybe not.
"Zoey," he said quietly, "Maybe you don't need us, but we need you. I'm only good for jinxing us and getting a couple decent shots in some zombie skull sometimes. But you? You're what keeps us together."
Zoey smiled, inhaling through her nose. "All two of you, huh?"
"Two of us plus you is all we got right now. I know it's not much. But please, please…"
She finally looked at him. "I'm not going anywhere, Lou." Then her grin took on that impishness that it had been missing for a while. "And neither is Francis if we let him sleep much longer."
As ungraceful as he was, the message had gotten across. Louis took a long, invigorating breath. Discharging shotgun rounds into rotting intestine could be a good wake-up call for everyone.