"This is bad, this is bad," I muttered, pacing back and forth between the trees, my hands clasped together behind my back. This was pretty much my typical panic response, to pace and murmur to myself in any kind of bad situation. In fact, sometimes it seemed like a wonder I had survived this long. I usually just attributed that to the fact that I had a very protective twin brother who had been involved in sports since he was four.
"We know!" Brady snapped, clenching his fists and holding them at his sides to keep himself from lashing out at the nearest tree. As the only son in my family, my brother was never big on showing weakness or worry, so his response these days was always getting angry. Actually, that was his response to most things.
"Brady, just calm down," Marcus said, holding his right hand to his head, two fingers on his right temple and his thumb on the end of his jawline. Marcus was a man with heaps of military experience, so he was usually the one of who best kept their calm. It was always what helped him keep our little band together, and more importantly, alive.
Brady huffed, turning around and slamming his fist into the nearest tree with an echoing smack. I barely flinched. On top of football, he had also done boxing. No wonder he was such a ball of fury. There were no bags for him to punch, or an opposing team to tackle, so his only means of anger release were taking down zombies. I have to admit, I had been both shocked and appalled when I first saw him let loose into one of the bumbling bozos, repeated plunging his knife into its decayed skull over and over long after he had killed it. Now, though, I barely looked twice. Yes, my brother was damaged, but so were Marcus and I. Besides, he was still my brother.
My stomach growled, and I winced at the sound. I didn't want to admit it, but I was starving, which was awful, considering the dwindling amount of food we had on us. Marcus reached into his bag and handed a granola bar out to me. I opened my mouth to protest, but I was interrupted by another growl of my stomach, so I took it, my head dropping in shame as I tore open the wrapper and took a bite.
The granola bar didn't eradicate my hunger, but it certainly stopped the angry protests of my stomach. After I had made sure to eat every last crumb to avoid wasting anything, I balled up the wrapped and hurled it into the trees. Granted, it didn't go very far, but it was a pretty impressive throw for me. I turned back to Brady, who had calmed down after punching the tree. He was now sitting on the ground with Marcus, looking over a map. I crouched down beside them, and listened as Marcus went over our course for the next couple of days.
"We're around here," he said, pointing to a spot on the map in the woods. "And the cabin is back here. In the next few days, I say we circle around to give it a couple of days to make sure all the corpses are gone, but we don't want to stop moving, not when we're out in open forest like this." I nodded along, following his finger as it curved around through the trees. Marcus then folded up the map and stuck it in his pocket.
"What about sleeping?" I asked. Both he and Brady turned to look at me in confusion. "I mean, we haven't been in a situation like this since there was still five of us. I guess we could put one of us on watch while the other two slept, but who's going to make sure they don't pass out? After all, there are only three of us."
"You're right," Marcus said. "If we were to put two people on watch, somebody would have to take two shifts back to back. However, if there's only one person on watch, they could doze off and nobody else would be awake to stop them."
We stared at each other in silence, unsure of what to do, until an unfamiliar voice cut through the quiet like a knife.
"We can help with that."