Skip a few months, amount uncertain, to the silent Georgian woods.
Alma woke with a start from where she slumbered in a tree. The plane she had cleared in the center was shaded enough that for a few moments she wasn't sure if it was still night, or if her eyesight was starting to deteriorate again. She softly cursed and pushed herself up from the sleeping back, groggily wondering why she woke so suddenly. She then heard it again, a sound. Hooves. They weren't the quick and soft hooves of a few stray deer, but the frantic and heavy pulses of a horse, cantering through the trees. She began to accustom herself to the light streaming in through the leaves, began to focus onto her surroundings and peered over the edge of the plane to see what was going on below her safe perch. To the east she saw the rear of a brown horse disappearing into the trees. Nearby she heard the guttural whispering of the ravine. Not far she could her tender moaning from the walkers. But a horse? A freakin' horse running wanton throughout the trees like some spirit? She blinked and huffed a sigh. The fuck was in that soup I made? Maybe that wasn't really some type of herb I found in that garden…. But Alma didn't feel the typical slowness or hype of a high. Nor did she begin hallucinating wildly. She had only seen a horse. After all, there was a farm nearby…
She heard a splash.
From down in the ravine it sounded, igniting her cat-like curiosity. Was it the rider of the phantom horse? Some injured fowl drowning pathetically? A reanimated corpse going for a pleasant swim? She heard what sounded like groans so she assumed it was a walker and so she turned her eyes back to her nest.
The red sleeping bag looked furious, all rumpled up beneath her body. Too heavy, it gasped. Alma knew good goddamn well that she had lost her tubbiness just like she predicted would happen in the case of an apocalypse. She kicked the fabric off of her and stretched, naked, in the afternoon light. She was haunted by how constant the sun was. It reminded her daily that she needed to remember something, needed to move on, needed to keep searching but for who….
For Emily?
Alma let out a peal of laughter.
"You've gotta do better than that, Alma. Emily's dead and you wouldn't even get close to New York without freezing your pale behind or having it eaten off. Either way, that girl is dead."
This no longer saddened Alma. Just as she had done in her 24 years of life, she'd learned laughter was the only way life could be managed. Bullshit was still bullshit, but it really made a difference if you could flush afterwards instead of letting it build up. So here she was, laughing over the death of the only person Alma still breathed for. Nestled in the safety of her elevation, she giggled over just about everything she could. When she saw the stack of cash still littering the bottom of her backpack, she laughed. When she saw the stain of blood where she had ravenously eaten a few mice she caught, she laughed. When she considered that maybe being a zombie wouldn't be so bad after all, she laughed. Ironically, a lone walker beneath the tree's boughs hissed as it heard her but could not see. It loitered there, confused for a while, before stumbling off towards the ravine. Alma watched it go, not once having picked up her bow. She watched as would an angel her children, a shepherd his flock, a mother ger her child. The kindred between man was inescapable, even if said man was dead and hungering for your flesh. Over the past few months (months?) Alma had fallen from a determined and serious young-woman, squishy and out of breath and yet so damned determined to kill every last one of those living corpses, to a lost soul, trapped in the confines of her insanity and loyal only to the trees that held her higher than harm. How long had she been here? How long had she been cowering in her glorified fort, waiting for some miracle to come alone?
After clothing herself in her leggings and tank, followed by the duct tape lined hoodie, she climbed from her tree, slipped into her tall boots, and slid her quiver over her slopped shoulder. No walker was in sight. The woods seemed so clear, seemed so calm. It was more like a pre-apocalypse hike than a post-apocalypse hunt. For hours she nimbly sprinted about, shooting small critters through with her skillfully crafted arrows. She found herself so lost in the monotonous chore that she welcomed a small herd of walkers, reveled in how frustrated they became when she perched in a tall tree and shot them down. Once they fell, she'd leap down and retrieve her arrows, retrieve anything shiny she encountered on their corpses, and move on. The leaves beneath her chattered endlessly as she passed them by, and sighed loudly when touch by an arrow from her swift bow. She reminded herself of a sprite. An elf. Like Legolas. Kick-ass.
She smiled as she recalled her favorite character from her favorite story, Lord of the Rings. Instead of long blonde hair she had long golden curls, usually tied up into a bun atop her head. Instead of long thin legs, hers were short and muscular, and led up to the large, round ass she had sported since she was a teen. Her lean stomach was shaped as an hourglass, but stubbornly wouldn't give way to abs. It was always mildly soft to the touch. Instead of pecs, she sported a coupled of squishy boobs. Instead of what she imagined was probably a wonderful dick, she had a hairy ol' vagina. Then only thing she could relate was her alabaster skin-every day, she dutifully slathered her body in scavenged sunscreen. Cancer was not something she could handle without the presence of modern medicine. She only thanked her lucky stars that she had her eye surgery before trying to manage her shitty potato vision in the middle of a global melt down. Green as they were, they were not as fresh as fields of dewy grass. The used to see as well as an ass could pee.
The sun was centered in the sky when she finally circled back to her tree. The lip of the ravine quivered just a few feet from her, and her canteen was hollow at her bony hip, the two hard edges arguing madly when she walked. She looked up at the plane, and scurried up only to place her daily treasures before leaping down and walking to the ravine's edge that so seductively enticed her, its watery murmur thick on her parched tongue.
As she skipped cautiously down the steep and loose slope, she noticed something wasn't right. To her right, a heavy trail of dirt and leaves seemed to have avalanched downward, yet it was scattered as if attempted from another angle. Blood was still slick on a scrawny tree near the disturbance, and she grabbed a hold of some branches to get a better look at the gore and path of distress. When she got closer, she heard a sharp sound of a body on leaves, and a deep groan. Instinctively she lifted herself up into the low hanging branches so that she was raised from the ground. She craned her neck to look further down the ravine, maneuvering like a lemur to get a better view. She really didn't know what to make of what she saw.
A rough-and-tumble cowboy looking type, grizzled and bloodied and sopping wet, was pulling himself steadily up the slope by roots and solidified soil. There was a blank and unseeing glare in his dark, squinted eyes that sent a chill down Alma's spine. He was definitely not a walker. There was something too sentient about him, too feral. Even the dead were more laid back than he. Sweat peeped on his brow, wrangled in what looked like pain, and his lips were tightened and white over his teeth. She considered for a moment leaving her guard to help the poor man, but the blood pouring from his side was something that kept her wary. If he was bit, than he was too dangerous for her. He could turn at any minute and snap her hand off before she could say "Sorry". She wasn't about to risk that for some reason. She had a new sense of self-preservation as she watched the man steadily drag his body up the steep incline. If anything, she was jealous that she lacked the upper-body strength to pull something like this off. Then she saw it.
As the man passed beneath her, unaware of her presence, she saw a crossbow, bulky unlike hers of swift wind and grace, strapped to his back. Immediately, a sense of kindred much like she felt towards the dead swelled within her. She saw blood in his hair and around his mouth when he came into view, and saw by a flash of skin, a puncture wound rather than a festering bite on his left side torso, poorly wrapped up by a strip of cloth. Just as he made it past her, she leapt down. He had just reached the lip of the ravine, just reached flat ground, when he heard two feet land in unison on the ground. He tried to whip around quickly, tried to lift off his back to get a better view of the feet's owner, but a dizzy fog kept his head glued to the earth and eyelids fluttering heavily.
"M-Merle…" He moaned quietly as a familiar face appeared above him.
Alma sighed, watching over where he fumbled pitifully in the dirt, batting his weak hands in the air over his face. "Merle," she repeated. "What a sorry, redneck name."
As she watched over him, eyes regarding him with a gaze of serenity, she felt something close to compassion, a feeling she had somewhat forgotten in these end of days. The longer she simply watched, the further from consciousness he slipped. She had already made up her mind.
Lifting with her legs, she hauled the man half over her shoulders. He was easily a few heads taller than she, making climbing up the tree exceedingly difficult. However, she managed to shove him like a china plate to a high shelf onto the plane where she slept. Before going up after him, she grabbed a canteen of water dangling from his belt and scurried with hers down to the water's edge. When she got there, she saw in the stiller part of the waters a reddened swath of blood, and lodged in the skull of a rotten corpse laying some ways off, was a single arrow. Without much thought to the scene before her, she filled the canteens with clean, moving water before scurrying back over to her tree. Upon returning, she realized her captive was bleeding out profusely and he had slipped into a deep trance-like unconsciousness.
"Okay Merle or whoever the hell you are, you listen good. I am NOT going to let you die. Not so you can haunt MY tree house and pin this on ME." she muttered to the groaning man. At her acerbic words, his eyelids fluttered, but she had already dampened a rag and placed it over his eyes. She got to work by removing his shirt and pants and makeshift bandage, as well as placing aside his weapon and bag. She was careful to keep the grimy belongings separate from her pristine ones. She then lifted his head on her thigh, now outstretched to support him, and brought the canteen to his lips. He was unresponsive.
Patting his sweaty, bloody cheeks, she said loudly, "Wake the fuck up dude. You're quitting on me. That's not fucking cool. If I don't get to quit neither do you. Drink water. Drink all of it for all I care." To punctuate her phrase, she slapped him hard across the face and brought her eyes down to his level. His had snapped open, bewildered. At first, he struggled against her touch, against her hold, but he then felt the cool water trickle into his mouth and he began to gratefully gulp it down. Alma even managed a crooked smile for her patient.
"You're gunna wanna pass back out for this part," she said kindly once the first canteen was empty. She was already using the water from the other to clean his deep wound. Whatever punctured him went straight through but had missed any organs. This was one lucky fucker. "The stuff I keep for disinfecting….let's just say it feels like the devil's pissing where it hurts the most." She smiled broad again, noticing he wasn't passing out anytime soon. She sighed and moved on. The bottle of alcohol was still relatively full from the last time she had to use it, and her good bandage was still clean. She first poured a few drops of alcohol onto a cloth, pressing them onto either side of the wound, cleaning the preliminary bacteria. The man in her lap had again begun to moan and complain at the acidic burn. Poor fuck, She thought as she picked up the bottle for the next step. She now poured the alcohol slowly into the wound, making sure it seeped thoroughly over the exposed area. As it seemed to sputter in his raw flesh, the man seemed more alive than ever. He bucked his body madly before realizing how much that hurt, and instead took to loudly cussing and batting at the arm that poured the alcohol. When he finally struck, the precious liquid leapt from the bottle, much of it wasted on the bark of the tree.
"Man, fuck trees," she grumbled as it seemed to absorb the alcohol. At the sound of her voice, the man seemed to still but for a moment to look now at her. Alma was already wrapping the bandage around his torso, tightening the cloth and sensing the blood being forced to run into his veins again. The pressure silenced him, like rocking will a crying baby. Once it was secure, she pulled back to look at him. His eyelids were heavy, but the color was slowly returning to his face-his worn, battered face. Every line told a story, held a memory.
"Sleep," Alma sighed, removing her leg and reaching for her own pillow to place beneath his head. He was one step ahead of her, eyes closing not in sleep but in unconscious delirium. She watched him for a moment before retrieving the animal bodies still uncooked from the other side of him, taking them down to the ground with her so she could make a fire and cook the meat.
As she cleaned the bodies and placed the good meat on a flat rock, she began to gently think to herself. She thought about the situation, the bloodied ravine, the crippled cowboy sleeping on her goddamn pillow. And yet only one word filled Alma's head.
Shit.