Author's Note: Thank you to everyone who reviewed and followed the first chapter! I know first chapters usually aren't much to go on, so I'm glad I got some feedback :) Here is chapter number two!
I made the decision to call it a day, despite Sophia's polite protests of continuing. But daylight was fading. We hunkered down in a thicket, surrounded by boughs of an evergreen. The thicket was big enough for me, Sophia, and Ares to huddle together in, and we ate a meal of cold beans for dinner before hunkering down for the night. The sun was nearly set, and the creatures of the forest grew silent. Ares sighed beside me and I rested a hand on his soft head, scratching softly. I was leaning up against the rough bark of a tree, but I hardly felt it as the day's events caught up to me.
I stayed awake as long as I could, but sometime during the night, I dozed.
When I woke the next morning, Sophia was awake and sitting cross-legged across from me, trying to, what appeared to me, teach Ares a new trick.
"Paw," she said, drawing it out as she held out her hand to him. The lab just blinked at her lazily and opened his mouth to pant, and she sighed, slouching in defeat. I found myself smiling softly and alerted them both by yawning.
"Good morning," Sophia chirped. "How did you sleep?"
"Surprisingly," I said, cracking my back, "not all that bad considering I had a tree for a mattress."
"Me too. I was warm, too."
"Bushes will help with that. So, the plan for today is to head back closer to the highway and see if your mom will show up. We'll keep to the trees though in case those men decide to come back. Got it?"
"Got it."
We climbed none-too-gracefully out of the thicket and Ares shook himself out before promptly finding a tree to mark. Sophia giggled girlishly and hid her mouth with her hand, causing me to smile wryly. I was happy to see she hadn't totally succumbed to the darkness this new world brought.
At least not yet.
As we headed back to the highway, we snacked on a granola bar, splitting it between the three of us to conserve our stores. We walked mostly in silence for a little while, until Ares stopped and growled low in his throat, his hackles raising along his back. I swung an arm out in front of Sophia to stop her and she squeaked at the sight of a group of four roamers staggering towards us, all in a varied state of decay. Two of them looked severely burnt, for all that was left of their faces was black, charred skin. They smelled terrible as they drew closer, and Ares leapt forward, distracting two of them.
Dropping my pack, I shoved Sophia behind a tree and drew my knife, dancing around the pair as they snarled and snapped their teeth. One reached out and managed to curl its dead fingers into the sleeve of my jacket, trying to tug me closer. With my opposite arm I slammed it down on its elbow, grimacing as the elbow separated from the body, leaving a puddle of black goo on the leaves. The fingers relaxed and the arm dropped from my body, leaving me free to bury my knife to the hilt in the roamer's temple. It dropped with a thud, and a snarl behind me made me glance over my shoulder.
Ares was running circles around his roamers, keeping them occupied while I took care of the fourth. My knife unavailable, I bent for a rock and twirled it in my hands, biding my time. When the roamer lunged, mouth open wide, I spun to the left and it staggered past me. I kicked it in the back of the knee, sending it sprawling face-first into the ground before kneeling on its back and bringing the rock down on its head until it stopped moving.
Using the bloody rock, I threw it hard at one of the roamers chasing Ares, knocking it off balance. It went down on its knees and I used my boot to cave its skull in. I exhaled as I slipped in the muck from its skull and turned to the last roamer. It lunged for Ares, nearly catching his tail in its dead hands.
"Ares, away," I ordered loudly with a wave of my arm. Ares bounded behind me and I had the roamer's full attention. Weaponless, I glanced around me, finding a hefty branch lying not five feet from me. With one eye on the roamer I dashed towards it and raised it like a bat, swinging heavily to crush its skull in one blow. It hit the ground with a wet thud, oozing fluid over the forest floor.
I tossed the stick, panting, and stepped over to the first burnt roamer to yank my knife from its skull. I grimaced, wiped the muck on its tattered shirt.
"Sophia? It's safe, come on out." Her blonde head appeared behind the tree and she stepped out into the small clearing, visibly shaken. "It's okay. I'm fine, Ares is fine. Hey, do you see that?"
Above her head, through a break in the trees, a large pillar of white smoke billowed into the sky. Sophia turned to look up with me and I heard her intake of breath.
"We should check that out," she said, and I hummed an agreement. So with a new plan in mind, we gathered our supplies and headed towards the tower of smoke. "What do you think it is?"
"I'm not sure. An explosion or something."
"Maybe it's a signal fire. We learned about those at summer camp, how you need to make it big enough to be seen from a distance."
"That's right." I didn't voice my concerns that no one in his or her right mind should be sending up a signal fire, not now, not with people the way they were. I had my reservations about this smoke cloud, but nevertheless, it needed to be investigated.
It was midafternoon when we came to the edge of the tree line. I stopped us at the rim of the forest, looked out across the newly-opened spans of land before us. It looked like a farm, and we'd come to a pasture. The pasture was clear of walkers, but across the long grass we found the source of the smoke. As we crossed the field, the remnants of a barn loomed in front of us. A little white farmhouse sat fifty yards away, seemingly untouched. The front door was opened. My attention, however, was drawn to the numerous bodies strewn across the property—all of them roamers. Some kind of battle took place here, and recently. A burned RV was parked next to the barn.
"What happened here?" I muttered, staring up at the blood coating the inside of the RV's windows.
"This is Dale's RV…" Sophia whimpered. I turned to her, and she had tears streaming down her face. "My group, my mom…they were here. Now they're…"
"We don't know that, Sophia. Look, there are no other cars here, see? You had a big group, right?" She nodded and wiped her nose. "I bet a bunch, if not all, of them made it out of here." Some unlucky bastard just happened to volunteer for RV duty and ended up as roamer bait, but I kept that happy little thought to myself.
We wandered the property more, scouring the bodies for any that Sophia might have recognized. Closer to the house, some poor older blonde woman lay staring lifelessly upwards, her body a gaping, raggedy, bloody mess. There wasn't enough left of her to turn. Sophia cowered away from her, and I wrapped an arm around her shoulder to steer her away. So far, no one from Sophia's group was among the bodies.
"Let's see if we can find anything useful," I told her before heading up to the house. As I turned, something white caught my eye. Four handmade and painted crosses stood erect on the edge of the property. I stepped closer to inspect them. Names had been carved into the wood on the crosses.
Dale—the owner of the RV?—Annette, Shawn, and… I frowned.
Sophia's name was the last one carved on a cross.
"They thought I was dead…" I jumped at her sudden proximity and frowned even deeper as fresh tears leaked out of her eyes. I hugged her to me tightly and she let herself sniffle.
"Oh, honey. Wait and see how happy they'll be once they find out they were wrong. Come on, let's head up to the house."
The house was a goldmine of supplies. Medicine, suture kits, gauze, plus a seemingly endless amount of canned food waited for us inside. It was as if the place was completely untouched. Sophia took care of the kitchen and living room and I headed up the stairs to the bedrooms. The first one I came to was a guest room, it seemed. A typical country quilt lay on the full-size bed, rumpled from its last inhabitant. I snatched it, rolling it tightly to stuff it into my pack. Then I followed it up with clothes from the drawers in the remaining bedrooms. Two girls, perhaps just slightly older than Sophia, had lived here. Most of their clothes were small, so they'd fit me and Sophia could grow into them.
My pack was practically spilling over as I tried to stuff even more clothing into it, but when I couldn't, I was forced to abandon it. Downstairs, Sophia had gathered herself a nice little pile of supplies.
"These were our tents," she said sadly, staring at the bags before her. I smiled sadly and hefted one of them onto my shoulder.
"Let's take two, just in case, and we can leave the rest. Ready?"
"Yeah. Let's go."
Once outside, I looked around once more and paused at the sight of a second barn, untouched and closed. A paddock was attached to the side and suddenly a lightbulb went off in my head.
"Hey Sophia? Come on. Let's go this way. I think there might be a horse in this barn."
"Really?" A quick little smile brightened her face. "I always wanted to learn to ride, but Daddy never let me."
"That's a shame. I took some lessons when I was your age too. Have to say it's been a while since I've been in the saddle, though."
I pulled the door open slowly, relieved when snorting instead of snarling welcomed me. I smiled, opened the door wider, and stepped inside. A single dark horse had its head over its stall door, its ears perked. As I neared it, it flattened its ears and jerked away, no doubt terrified I was a roamer.
"Easy," I cooed, and to my relief, the horse seemed to relax the more I spoke to him. I reached out to touch his nose. "That's a good boy. I'm not going to hurt you. What's say we get you out of there huh?"
Laying down my heavy pack, I gathered up a saddle and bridle and quickly tacked the horse, led him out into the aisle. Sophia was in awe and Ares reached out with his nose to sniff a leg. The horse stamped its foot and Ares yelped in surprise. Sophia and I laughed, and then I helped her onto the horse's back. I handed up her pack and the tent bags, which she clutched tightly to her front, and then I grabbed my pack and somehow hefted myself into the saddle. Taking the reins, I nudged the horse into a trot and we left the barn and the property, heading back into the woods.
We covered ground way faster on horseback, and I couldn't deny the joy of being in the saddle once again. We rode up a ridge along the creek, and not long after that I felt Sophia's full weight on me. Bending around her, I smiled upon seeing that she'd dozed off, probably lulled to sleep by the gentle swaying of the horse.
We rode on like that for a week; I alternated between riding and leading the horse on foot to keep him from tiring out, and Sophia began taking watch through the night. Since the farm, we had seen no further sign of Sophia's group, and we were both feeling the effect. Sophia's mood was worsening until I had to work to get even a trace of a smile from her. She was outwardly expressing the frustration I was keeping locked inside. I had to be strong, for her, for both of us, and I hated to think where our morale would wind up should I let myself succumb.
But in the farthest recesses of my mind, I was beginning to doubt that we would find them. We hadn't seen any sign of a living person since the men on the highway, and we were fortunate that we hadn't run into them again. Roamers were in abundance. Sophia and I had hidden from them more than killed them, but I was beginning to realize that, sooner or later, she needed to learn how to defend herself, how to handle and respect a weapon, how to replace that childish skittishness with bravery and steadfastness.
But still we saw no sign of human presence two weeks after that. We had found a ramshackle hunting cabin on the edge of the forest a few dozen miles north of Atlanta. Our stores were dwindling a bit, so I took it upon myself to learn how to hunt and fish using only what I had. On one of our few runs into towns—we tended to avoid them as much as possible—I managed to find myself a suppressor and a handgun that it fit. Ammunition was running low, so the handgun wouldn't be useful for hunting. A second trip to a picked-over Dick's Sporting Goods fixed that problem, however. I managed to find a compound bow that had been kicked under one of the shelving units and a handful of arrows for it. I put it to use that same day as a trio of roamers came ambling out of the stockroom, all wearing uniforms. My aim left something to be desired but the Three Dead Amigos made for pretty decent target practice.
We'd lost the horse about a week back to an unfortunate accident. He'd slipped on some rocks along a rocky bank next to the river and had snapped his foreleg like a twig. It was only humane to put him out of his misery, and it hurt to do so, but he'd fed us well. Sophia had cried as we'd dressed the carcass, and I had to steel myself against doing so too. I made sure to whisper a thank you to him before I put him down.
I took to the woods every morning until early afternoon, hoping to put my hunting skills to the real test. For my first few kills, which only consisted of a couple of rabbits and a fat opossum, the nausea and horror of killing a living thing nearly made me lose my lunch, but then the survivalist side of me reared her head and told me to cowboy up to keep Sophia and Ares fed.
Speaking of our canine companion, he turned out to be quite the squirrel catcher. He chased them out from the underbrush and like lightning, he'd have them locked in his jaws. When my hunts were successful, we gave the squirrel meat to Ares; I thought it tasted kind of gamey myself and Sophia usually passed in favor of a can of beans.
Sophia was sorting mushrooms when I returned one afternoon, my belt laden with a skunk, who tried and failed to spray me, a rabbit, and two squirrels—which, mind you, make for difficult targets, thank you very much. Her eyes lit up at the sight of the meat and she set aside her mushrooms. I had to give the girl props; it only took her three skinned carcasses to grow nerves of steel and quit throwing up at the sight of freshly-killed animal innards. She eagerly stood and scurried across the cabin to get the bucket to catch the innards.
"You're getting better with that," she exclaimed, following me out the back of the cabin. To keep the dead away from the cabin, we'd chosen a spot to clean our kills behind the building, further into the woods. We were sure to bury the remains well, but one could never be too careful now.
"I think I am," I agreed, swinging the belt of kills onto the ground. I plopped down on a stump and Sophia sat across from me, the bucket between us. I yanked my knife from my boot—a spare that I'd found that was for skinning kills only—and handed it to her, handle first. "You remember how to skin a skunk?"
Her expression pinched for a moment as she thought, but then she grinned and nodded excitedly. I passed the dead animal to her by its tail and she laid it on a large rock I'd found that served pretty well as a table of sorts. I watched her, in mild fascination, as she sliced the animal down the middle of its belly, her face the picture of concentration.
"You're getting faster," I observed as she deftly yanked the black and white pelt from the body. I took it from her to hang and treat. Once winter came, it would come in handy. Georgia wasn't particularly frigid in the winter, but it was cold enough that we would need the extra warmth.
Sophia shot me a triumphant grin before she split the animal open and began pulling out the innards, stark red against her tanned hands. Within minutes, the skunk was finished and she was starting on the rabbit. By the time we'd finished, Ares was eyeing the squirrels hungrily and my own stomach was grumbling at the prospect of a hot meal.
Back inside the cabin, the meat roasted on a spit above the fire, filling the small space with its aroma. Sophia picked up a can of green beans and popped it open, setting it near the fire to warm up.
Despite her earlier cheerfulness, Sophia's mood seemed to dampen as we ate; she stared listlessly into the fire, lost in her own head. I stretched out a leg and nudged her with my boots.
"You okay?" I asked around a mouthful of beans. Over the past few weeks, I'd gotten to know Sophia very well. Her mannerisms, her moods. What once was a shy, skittish, terrified girl, now stood a strong, capable young woman in her place. I liked to think I'd helped her along the way to become a survivalist, to harden herself against the horrors of this new world. The only thing we hadn't yet accomplished was a roamer kill, but we were getting there.
Sophia seemed reluctant to answer at first, chewing slowly to occupy her mouth. But then she looked at me and I was struck with the despair and loss I suddenly saw in her eyes. I knew what was coming; she went through an episode like this once a week. Mostly she held it together, but sometimes, especially within the semi-safe confines of our little cabin, she let it out, where she knew she could cry without risking giving away our position to a cluster of roamers.
"I miss my mom," she whispered, sniffling once before wiping her nose on her arm, and then she composed herself. She held it together in front of me, but I knew that later, as I kept watch outside, she would let herself cry into her pillow for her lost mother, her group.
I reached over, like I did every time she felt like this, and laid a hand on her knee. Before Sophia, I'd kept myself locked up tight so long that I wasn't sure anymore how to outwardly show emotion. Sadness, happiness, grief, loss… It was all unknown to me, foreign. But I felt awkward sitting there, my hand on her knee, as she stared off into the flames, picturing where her family might be.
Without being fully aware of it, I started speaking.
"My husband and I got separated at the start of all this. He was away on business for a few weeks, and I'd stayed home in Georgia. He called me the night everything started here; he said they were already two days in with no signs of things rectifying. He told me to stay at home, stay put, and he'd come home. So I did, for a few days, and when he didn't come home, I knew I couldn't stay. So I gathered supplies, grabbed Ares, and we tried to get out of Georgia. I'd resigned myself to the fact that we might not see each other ever again. It was…difficult, the first few days after I came to that conclusion, and I didn't do anything but cry."
"Do you think he's dead?" Sophia asked meekly, still staring at the fire. I sighed through my nose and set down my nearly-empty bowl. I bent my knees and rested my elbows on them, locking my fingers together.
"I don't know. I think I would know if he was. We had that kind of relationship," I said wistfully, with a sad smile. Suddenly the wall I'd kept up seemed to crack a little, and I felt my throat tighten and my eyes sting. God, I hadn't cried in months. It felt weird.
I cleared my throat and built the wall right back up. You can be sentimental later. I stood, picking up our dishes to wash them in the small sink at the back of the cabin. One thing we'd definitely noticed was that it still had running water, so we were able to wash up during the day. The water was ice cold, but against the heat of the summer, it was a welcome reprieve.
"It's okay to feel sad," Sophia said to me quietly as I kept my back to her. My shoulders stiffened, but I continued to listen. "I know you're sad sometimes. I can see it when you think you're hiding it really well. It's okay to miss him, as long as you don't let it consume you, right?"
I smiled fondly, turning to look at her over my shoulder. "As long as it doesn't consume you. When'd you get so smart?"
"When I met you."
Her words hit me like a sucker punch to the gut. We held eye contact, and my throat bobbed as I swallowed thickly. Since I'd never had kids, I'd never known that motherly instinct, that unconditional love. But Sophia was rapidly changing that. I cared for her like she was my own daughter, protected her, even loved her. I wasn't sure how she'd managed it within a month of traveling together, but she did, and now I wasn't ever letting her go.
After cleaning up, Sophia took Ares to the couch and laid down with him. He rested his head on his paws, watching me as I gathered a bottle of water, my bow, and a flashlight to keep me company on watch. The light in the cabin went out behind me, and I heard Sophia moving around trying to get comfortable. I took up my post outside the door, leaning against one of the columns and staring off into the dark.
As the night stretched on before me, I let my mind wander to my husband and where he might be. Reality told me he was more than likely dead, but the more irrational part of me, the part that was slowly appearing beneath the surface, didn't want to believe it. I would know it if he were dead; like twins had that ability, so did my husband and I. And I wasn't yet filled with despair that he was gone, didn't feel a hole in my chest that took his shape. I refused to believe he was dead.
I would see him again, in this world or the next, I was sure.
