Sorry for the delay, I've been...reading pornographic fanfiction again...
Chapter Eight
When It Helps To Let Your Guard Down
They turned back to back, a look of disapproval crossing both of their faces. Gwen raised her gun first, pointing it into the crowd. She fired a few shots, but it only made the moans and groans of the infected louder, almost as if they were excited that their meal was putting up a fight.
Courtney raised her bat, ready to jump down onto the trunk of the car and make some heads roll, but she didn't get the chance.
A piercing whistle cut through the air, bouncing off the metal car exterior and forcing a few zombies backwards. The ones that still had half a brain turned towards the sound, along with Courtney and Gwen.
A hundred feet away, on the roof of another car, stood a young teenage boy. He was scrawny and tired-looking, almost as if he hadn't eaten in six years. His dark colored hair was limp around his face and his clothes were torn with blood seeping through. He looked like he could collapse at any second, but he was waving his arms frantically in the air.
"OVER HERE!" He called out, but Gwen guessed it wasn't for her and Courtney to see. Oh no, it was for the zombies to see. He was creating a distraction, a much needed distraction that actually seemed to work.
Courtney grabbed Gwen's hand as some of the zombies ran in his direction. The boy didn't move, he stayed rooted to his spot. He waited for more of the zombies to close in on him to throw some sort of smoke bomb into the crowd. By the time the smoke had evaporated, the boy was gone, but so were Courtney and Gwen. While Gwen had stood staring, Courtney had pulled her away almost completely unnoticed. They continued to run down the main street until Courtney's arm was yanked sideways down an even darker side street.
"Follow me," whispered a voice, which Courtney could only place as belonging to the young boy. She some how trusted him and the three ran away from the noise and commotion of the zombies until the young boy pulled up short, quickly unlocking a front door to a house and letting Gwen and Courtney take shelter inside.
The three teenagers stopped to catch their breath and Courtney was about to thank the stranger for saving them, but Gwen beat her to talking.
"Why does it smell like death in here?"
"Probably because I haven't taken the dead body out of the living room yet."
He shrugged like it was nothing, but Gwen was starting to doubt Courtney's trust in strangers all over again. This boy didn't look as harmful as Alejandro had upon sight, but if he was harboring a dead body in his living room then maybe he was not the sort of person they should be associating with.
The boy walked off down the long hallway and opened the door at the very end; Gwen could only pray it wasn't the living room. Courtney followed him before the older girl pushed her behind, not wanting to endanger her anymore. Courtney rolled her eyes but held her tongue.
Gwen's gun was close to her side as she wormed her way through the doorway and found the teenage boy rummaging through a cupboard in the back, a flashlight reflecting off objects that the girls couldn't see. Strange shaped objects lined the wall around the cupboard and when Courtney squinted she found that they in fact covered every wall, but without a light it was hard to see what they were.
"Here," he spoke up, tossing something towards the girls. Gwen jumped back in case it hit her while Courtney managed to catch it one handed. It was a small plastic box that they had both seen before. It was the same that had come with Gwen's gun when she got it back from the survivors; bullets. "I uh...I figured you'd need some more."
"Thanks..." Gwen replied.
"Cody," the boy said eagerly, almost as if he didn't want her to forget his name any time soon.
"Thanks, Cody," Gwen said and Courtney could see his boyish grin through the darkness.
"You-You can stay here," he offered quietly. "For as long as you need to, I guess."
"We'll be gone by morning." Cody looked almost disappointed. Courtney was forced to remember the loneliness that she had felt when she had been hiding out at the school. It drove you crazy to not have anyone to talk to. Gwen didn't seem to understand, but Courtney knew all too well what it was like to be in Cody's shoes. She had craved company before Gwen had showed and would be lying if she said she hadn't been upset when she had left the next morning.
Cody instructed the pair of them to get some sleep. He claimed to never sleep very well during the night, and the bags under his eyes proved it. Gwen knew what it was like to not want to sleep anymore, out of fear and guilt, but she didn't try to bond over that fact with Cody, instead she took the master bedroom.
Courtney and Gwen laid side-by-side in the king size bed, listening to the soft breathing that they both emitted. They weren't overly excited to fall asleep after the attack, and Gwen was still a little weary of Cody. Courtney was too wrapped up thinking about Gwen and what she had said. And the fact that Courtney had actually had the courage to kiss her.
"We should talk," the younger girl said at last. Gwen tried to swallow her pride, but it wouldn't go down. She rolled away, her back to Courtney, muttering something about being too tired. "I-It's okay, you know," Courtney continued, pressing the matter harder. "I'm not mad or anything. I just...I don't know...I don't know if I feel the same." Gwen was silent. Courtney could tell she wasn't sleep by her heavy breathing, obviously embarrassed by what she had said during what they had both thought to be their final moments. "I like kissing you, though." She turned away too, trying to force herself to drift off, but it isn't until Gwen distances herself from her own side of the bed and wraps one arm around Courtney's waist does she finally manage to fall asleep.
The sun rose, but the girls stayed in bed way past that. It was the most undisturbed sleep they had ever shared. No sun to peek through the curtains because they were on the west side of the house. No need to panic about a zombie attack because Cody was downstairs guarding them. Though, subconsciously, they both knew it was the cuddling that did it. The feeling of being safe and protected by someone else. Though both would argue they didn't need protecting, they would both do their best to protect each other from everything thrown their way.
Gwen was the first to awake, which was unusual. Gwen was too much of a heavy sleeper to wake up first, something Courtney had learnt fast, but she still tip toed around the bedroom just in case it disturbed her. Gwen was doing the same now, tip toeing around the house as if she could disturb her friend from another room.
She made her way downstairs, avoiding the second from bottom step that had given out a loud creak when she had stepped on it last night. In that moment it had terrified her because she was sure the zombies had super sensitive hearing and were going to come crashing into the house at any moment. Cody assured her that they were safe at his house.
He had explained that he and his father had lived here alone his whole life, right up until a month into the zombie attack. His father had been bitten on a grocery store run for supplies. He'd turned in the living room and Cody had shot his own father in the head with a rifle. Courtney looked shocked, as if she was about to break down crying at the very thought of it, but Gwen sympathized with him. She understood how he felt more than anyone else in that aspect of his life.
He knocked twice on the wooden door of the living room, letting them know that his fathers rotting corpse was still lying on the floor five months later. Cody informed them that he could always be found in the kitchen or the office- the room he had gotten the bullets from. Gwen now had them stashed away in the bedroom with her pistol.
A quick sweep of the kitchen proved that he wasn't in there, which led Gwen back down the long corridor. She lightly knocked her knuckles against the wood. She heard Cody's chair scrape against the floor a few moments later and his feet scampering across the floorboards towards her. He opened the door ajar, double checking who it was before opening it wide enough to let her in, his boyish grin back on his face.
"How'd you sleep?" He asked eagerly, staring at Gwen with round, blue eyes. She wanted to answer, but was too starstruck with what she was seeing. Courtney had told her about the shapes last night when Cody wasn't listening, but now in broad daylight she could see them.
Guns.
Every square inch of wall space was covered by a gun of some sorts. Gwen was still no expert, but now she understood why Cody had the spare bullets on hand. The large grey cabinet was pushed against one wall, but she could still see guns poking out from behind it.
"Oh, yeah..." Cody said sheepishly, rubbing the back of his neck nervously. "M-My dad collected firearms. He had a licence, but..." He shrugged one shoulder. His eyes wouldn't meet Gwen's for a moment, but when they did he started spewing all about Gwen's own pistol. She wasn't interested in it, but he obviously was, so for the sake of his sanity Gwen pretended to listen until Courtney joined them, asking if she could make breakfast. Cody argued that he could do it, but she was adamant that she made him a decent meal before sending him off for a nap. Cody truly was exhausted, but he had grown accustomed to not three hours sleep a week.
The silence between Courtney and Gwen was maddening. Courtney thought she was going to lose her mind if Gwen didn't say something to her soon. They were both calmly sipping down orange juice in the breakfast nook, not meeting each others eyes. At that point Courtney would have settled for what the plans for the day were, though there seemed to be none.
They couldn't exactly up and leave Cody while he was asleep after he had saved their lives- despite what Gwen wanted to do. If she had said so much to Courtney, though, she knew she would have received a earful of how 'wrong' that was.
The pair wandered around each other, careful not to disturb the other. Things were sufficiently awkward, to say the least. Cody didn't notice anything wrong when he woke from his midday sleep and made them all peanut butter sandwiches. The tension was invisible to the boy that just kept rambling on and on about whatever words sprang from his tongue, not caring about the direction of the conversation. Courtney feigned interest, Gwen couldn't have cared less. Her thoughts were tracing patterns in her mind and they usually overrode whatever this the hyperactive teenage boy had to say.
She couldn't get Courtney's words from her head, letting them replay themselves over and over again. She couldn't really have meant it, Gwen decided. She felt bad about not reciprocating Gwen's feelings and that was all; though Gwen wasn't even sure of her feelings. In the moment where she believed they were both going to die, words blurted from her mouth so fast that she didn't have time to even think them up before she was already saying them. Now Gwen was more confused than ever. Sure, she had, had feelings for girls before, she had dealt with that part of her life. But this was Courtney. Courtney was not just another girl crush, she was the one person in the world that she could rely on. Feelings of the romantic kind would easily jeopardize that.
"So...what you going to do?" Cody asked. Gwen was sat in his office at his desk and he was leaning on the back of the chair. Courtney had wandered off upstairs with a headache, leaving the two of them to talk.
Gwen blinked her eyes up at him, clearly confused. She hadn't been paying him much attention. Cody raised an eyebrow, "What are you going to do about your plan?"
"Oh," she replied, turning back to the desk. She had informed him of the plan to go to Newfoundland island, claiming him to be some sort of trustworthy. She could feel her walls diminishing, suddenly not caring too much about who she found suitable to tell of her plan. "I guess we'll head out tomorrow."
Cody nodded his head in agreement, furrowing his brows. "You're so smart," he exclaimed. "I feel that. The infected are always out at night so we should probably hold out until tomorrow."
"We?"
"Well, yeah, I'm not going to let you go alone," Cody argued. "You need a big, muscly man to protect you!"
"That doesn't explain why you're coming."
It was an eventful night. As they packed as many firearms they could get without being too overloaded with belongings to carry, the first attack began. It started with distant groaning, but it grew closer in time until it sounded as if it could have been on the outside of the office wall. Cody had switched all the lights off by that point. They each had flashlights, but refused to turn them on. It was easier to deal with things in the dark than to get caught by zombies.
Courtney offered to take first watch because she hadn't long woken up from her headache induced nap. Gwen had locked Cody out of the master bedroom, despite his attempts to tell her that it was for protection, and settled straight into bed. That was until the glass window on the wall to her right smashed and a zombie effectively climbed in.
Not missing a beat, Gwen grabbed her handgun and fire twice into the infected's forehead. She struggled to unlock the door, her eyes focusing on the hole in the window instead of what she was doing, but eventually swung the door open and ran down the hallway yelling for her two companions.
There hadn't been much of an argument on whether to let Cody come along or not- it was no secret they needed the weapons. The teenage boy was more than happy to aid them in their trek across Canada. In fact, he was practically jumping for joy when Courtney officially invited him.
The young girl was already rushing around, grabbing the bags they had acquired and sharing them out between them. Courtney slung her backpack over her shoulders, but it was heavier than she was used to and she struggled to run as fast as before. Cody grabbed the backpack full of handguns, as they collectively decided that shotguns and rifles were too big to carry, and ran towards the back door. Gwen had the third backpack, the one filled with all their necessities. Courtney had tried her best to keep only what they needed, but it was hard for her. As an ex-CIT she knew that everything came in handy at some point, which was why Gwen was struggling just as much as Courtney herself was.
They all grabbed walkie-talkies from the kitchen table before setting off. Together, they ran down the garden path and helped one another hop over the fence. This was one of the most infected towns Gwen had seen on her travels. It was as if every person in the city had been infected by the disease. There were hoards of zombies, even after the few they had managed to kill of the previous night. Now they were running for their lives, shooting guns that they weren't trained to use, praying for their lives.
