Pressure Cooker

The Mole felt like he was running through a funhouse. It was customary enough too. For the last two days, his entire life had been running. There'd been moments where he'd thought he'd make it, moments where he'd he thought he was going to die, but then there were the indifferent moments – the moments where he would just stare out at the road with no real direction in mind other than to keep walking like one of those wind-up-toys.

His stomach growled again and he resisted the urge to throw up. He'd already vomited five times since the morning and it wasn't something he wanted to go through again. He'd done the routine so many times now that he almost had it rehearsed. There was a gasp of hot breathe, almost acidic, and then the rising feeling of bile in your throat. Then your puke was on the ground. It hurt, it burned and with things already very bad, he didn't want to go through it again.

Sun was beginning to set throughout the forest now. He couldn't see it, but if anything, he could tell that light was fading. The crickets were starting to come out now, shrieking their clicking sounds in some kind of motorboat grinding. They couldn't hide the sound of the storm though. There was stillness in the air; the humid kind that was wet and moist with wind nipping at his cheeks every now and then.

He walked forward and felt a horrible aching in his foot. Blisters. Shouldn't have run, really shouldn't have….

Clearing his throat and getting an acidy aftertaste from the vomit, he stabbed his cane into the dirt road like a spade and felt the path. There were indents in it – and if there indents, that meant there were tracks. He'd bent down and felt them about a mile back, and although he'd always been pretty bad at taking stabs in the dark, he was pretty sure they were made by a car. His fingers had scraped against the pavement like thin charcoal, feeling the texture and studying the marks. It was a heavy car – probably either a truck or one of those big-tanker vans – but that was really beside the point; if there was a car, there had to be people driving it. Other people. Other people. Gotta be close….

He spit down into the earth and kept walking, his cane supporting his left side like a walking stick. He was aching all over. Whatever had attacked him pretty bad. Not just bad but the attack had spooked him into a strange mentality that was much more of a burden to carry around then his injuries. He'd tried to go to sleep around dawn, rolled over in the undergrowth on the road's curb near the forest, but he just couldn't. There were too many bad dreams – too many ideas that he didn't want to deal with and probably never would. So with his body hurting, he'd forced himself to get up and keep his nighttime stroll going on into morning. And so on…

And with that failed venture at sleep aside, he guessed that he'd been walking for what seemed like three days straight. No sleep. No pit-stops. Three days straight.

"Here's a guy", The Mole thought. "Here's a blind guy walking down a dirt road after an apocalypse. Here's a guy who doesn't know when to call it quits even when the truth's staring him in the face…."

He tapped his cane against the road, tried to get the general feel of it and kept walking. The van was close. The tracks were definitely newly paved. If you felt the texture, they weren't the rough and hazed-over like footprints that had long since deteriorated into the dirt. The tracks were fresh ones – and if he was fresh, then they were getting close. It was a chain-reaction. Tracks led to cars, cars led to people and people led to civilization. Or at least the closest thing he could find to a civilization. How close though? How much longer?

His inner monologue was disrupted when his stomach decided to call it quits again. His throat warm and wet, he hunched over in the trail and vomited out wet, white paste into the dirt. His cough was ragged – the kind that were always on TV of those quarantined, contagious people on the medical channel that they locked up in white rooms. He'd never really been able to see them, but he'd heard them, and if there was anything in the world more unpredictable than a cough, he had yet to see it. Common cold. Infection. Could be anything. Be prepared.

He kept walking down the trail, the sounds of the forest chirping and rustling all around him. The thoughts in his mind rambled. He thought of a lot of stuff. Commercials he'd heard on the radio. The cherry pie that you could get at the fair back at Happy Tree. Seeing eye dogs that he'd owned in the past but gotten rid of when he felt embarrassed at the idea of being lugged around by a domesticated pet. He wasn't blind, after all. He just couldn't see. There was difference, although most people didn't really care enough to see it.

He'd sort of raised himself, more or less. The Mole hadn't directly talked to either of his parents in years and it was a record worth keeping. The last time he'd ever heard from his mother was in one of those tacky postcards you could buy at pharmacy counters. There was a difference in this one though – she'd used a Braille printer to make the words readable to him. Then again, even with the charity of doing that, the message of the letter had been pretty bleak. She hadn't said hello. She had wanted him to send money. Even with the bad blood they'd had in the past, he'd tossed a hundred bucks into an envelope and sent it back. Her postcard was still taped to his fridge back at home. You could walk out on a lot of things, but you couldn't walk out on your family. Still, try telling her that. She gives you up because you're blind and you repay her twenty years later with an envelope full of cash….

The Mole didn't like charity. He was independent and he had been practically since birth. Being blind wasn't really a handicap. He was missing something, sure, but considering how he'd never really seen to begin with, it was no real loss. You learned to adapt. And out here too. You learn to adapt out here….

He'd tried, sure. He'd walked for three days straight, he'd fought when he had to and he'd conserved his energy. Still, things weren't adding up. If whatever had happened was really as bad as it seemed, then most of the people were probably dead. He hadn't heard or felt the presence of anyone else on the road and that definitely wasn't good news. He was falling apart in every sense of the word. He was satisfied with dying. It was just the start of something new. Rotting on the side of the road didn't frighten him. What did frighten him though, was the idea of sitting down on the side of the road and just calling it quits. It would prove everything he'd believed wrong. It would prove he was helpless. It would prove he was a loser. But most of all, it would prove that he was blind.

Survival always found a way to mellow itself down to a tunnel vision. After awhile, there really wasn't anything left to do but keep walking. And walking and walking and walki-

That was when he heard something. It was muffled, it was hard to make out and he ended up perking his ears. He thought he was wrong at first, maybe hallucinating from being out on the road for so long, but he wasn't. There was sound coming from further up the road. People were talking. There was the crackling sound of fire. With the world devoid of life, it only emphasized the situation that they were the only thing he could hear beside the life of the forest. The tire track people! It's them! It's them! You got em! You got em! You're never going down! You're never going down!

Feeling like a fist was pounding on the inside of his belly, The Mole somehow found the strength to start running.

Research center my ass….

Cuddles tore his hand into the bag of chips and pulled out a greasy handful. His stomach tried to reject it, demanding real food that it just wasn't going to get, but he forced the snack down and tried to shake off his oncoming migraine. He sat on the tree branch above the trail, wiping his sweaty face with his palms and heaving his rifle up into a good vantage point. There were a couple of infected corpses laid out all over the trail with their heads a mess of blood and buzzing flies, and he knew that there'd be more soon enough.

Sun was beginning to set over the forest now. Yellow and red lights lit up the forest's baldachin like a darkroom. All around him, the sounds of bugs began to come out in a low-static buzzing. There were a soft sloshing sound, and by the feel of it, he was probably close to a river - there was the swarm of gnats flying around the tree that only cemented the fact. Where there's bugs there's water, that's right…

He was exhausted. No not even exhausted – the way things were going, Cuddles were surprised that he wasn't at the verge of death. The day had started off okay. He'd tried to keep the group spirit up, or at least give it a good kick every time it got to low, but it really hadn't work. Nobody really seemed to like his attitude – if he wasn't talking to much about they were all going to be okay, then he was apparently trying to avoid the truth. It was stupid, but for the time being, he didn't want to think too much into it….

The research center had proven to be further away then they'd thought. There'd been a smile on Petunia's face when she said, "three hours tops", but it had turned out to be a big lie. Sun had fallen and they'd been forced to set up camp a little further down the road. There was such a lack of sound in the world around them now that he could hear them all the way from the campsite. Giggles had enthusiastically offered to cook again, but considering how everyone remembered the steaks from the night before, no one had protested Flaky's offer to put on the chef's hat for the night. She was grilling something over the fire now back at the campsite. Smells like stew. Beef maybe. Probably got it out of the trunk with all of that processed stuff Flippy packed. Stomach hurts. Hungry. You gotta wait though. Can't leave yet….

And he couldn't. After all, his philosophy in life was simple: if something got in the way of you having a good time, it had to be fought. Life wasn't about being on desolation row with a sniper rifle in your hand. Not at all. It seemed ironic giving the corpses sprawled out on the forest ground, but the honest truth was that Cuddles was a pacifist. Make love and not war, all of that jazz. He didn't want to kill and he felt terrible every time he did it, but it was just something that had to be done. The things that kept coming through the forest were trying to disrupt his philosophy. They were trying to break the very foundation that he put his life on. Hell, they were trying to disrupt his adventure. Just one look at those red, waterlogged eyes eyes was enough to send shivers down his spine. Shooting them down was his own private way of hiding the truth of what was really happening. If they were dead, then in his mind, he didn't have to think about them anymore. And then there's the fact that you're holding ground. Gotta keep everyone safe, yes-sir-ee…

They needed to be kept safe. After all, none of that had any clue what they were doing. Shifty was too arrogant to realize that everyone was just as scared as him, Lifty lived under his brother's shadow and was too scared to run away from it, Petunia was too much of a hardass, Giggles too much of a girly girl, Flaky was kind of a wimp and Nutty, well, he was Nutty. Nobody really had the group mentality thing and everyone knew it. That was probably why they were so scared. Nobody wanted to die, but the facts couldn't be clearer. Their group was falling apart and it would only be a matter of time before things really started to fall to pieces That doesn't mean you got to think about it though. Keep your sunny side up. Tommorow's a better day. Just keep trucking…

Cuddles sighed and ate another handful of chips. He'd go back in a few minutes. Maybe have some stew and kick back in one of those lawn chairs that he'd found stored in the trunk of the van. Then, with the world of death and disarray far away from them, he'd watch the stars come out with Giggles by the fire. Gotta protect her. She'll do something stupid if you don't protect her. Hell, maybe they'll all do something stupid if you don't look out for th-

There was a flutter of movement on the forest ground. A shadow was running. Snapping to life immeadidly, Cuddles grabbed the heavy rifle and pulled it into a firing position like a first instinct. His eyes looked around wildly, and without a second thought, he aimed the rifle down toward the trail in a quick arc and pulled the trigger.

KER-THUNK!

The shot was so loud and jolting that he nearly fell out of the tree. He looked around quickly, paranoid beyond belief, but life in the forest was going on. The crickets were still chirping and the sun was still setting. Nothing had changed. Shivering, he gazed over his shoulder and waited a second. He looked down to the ground and saw that he'd just added another body to the pile. It looked like a squirrel or something and it was eagle-sprawled on the ground. He was wearing a long, dark purple turtleneck and his sunglasses were skewed on his windswept face. The kind of walking cane that blind people used was lying off near his right hand. Although he'd missed the head, a decent portion of the neck had been blown off by the shot and loose, red veins were seeping out like a trash bin behind a slaughterhouse. The guy's head was cocked to the side; his face nudging against the dirt trail like it was a pillow.

Cuddles watched as its fingers twitched up and down just like the others before it. He watched for a whole minute until they finally stopped.

He wanted to feel safe. He wanted to feel relieved. But something was wrong. Something was very, very wrong. There was something off about those eyes. They didn't have the paned, watery look to them that all the other orange, infected eyes had. In fact, when Cuddles got a good look, he realized the eyes weren't orange at all. They were perfectly normal. Staring up at the sky and frozen in place unable to see much of anything, but perfectly normal for the most part. And that means….

"NO!" Cuddles screamed. "SON OF A BITCH!

He hopped down from the tree branch with his rifle and hit the trail on his knees. Scurrying up from the ground, he ran over to the body and knelt down beside it. There was no way – there was absolutely no way he'd shot a normal person. He'd been so careful. He'd kept his cool so well. How did that add up? What logic was there behind any of that? Swearing under his breath with his heart pounding in his chest, Cuddles looked at the boy and got a good view of the face, confirming two things in one clawing stroke. For one, the guy wasn't a squirrel – he was a mole. Second of all, he wasn't infected. This guy was normal, a refugee on the run just like the rest of them, and he'd blown his throat out like a damn water balloon. No! It was an accident! There's no way! I mean…I mean…awwww c'mon man…why did you have to come sneaking up on me like that? I didn't mean for this to happen! It's not my fault! I'm guilt for enough stuff already! I don't need this on my shoulders! C'mon, just get up! Please!

Cautiously with his whole body shaking, Cuddles gently rolled the body over and looked the guy up and down for any sort of identification. He searched the side pockets on the turtleneck's pocket and ended up retrieving a leather wallet. There was only a few dimes and nickels buried at the bottom of it. No license. No ID. Nothing. Nada. Zilch. This was just a nameless face that he'd sent right up the stairway to heaven. No opinion was needed. Just one click of the trigger and he was gone.

He started sniffling and only had the dim realization that he was crying. Life wasn't supposed to be like this. Life was about going out and having a good time. It was about getting up on Saturday mornings and riding your bike around your cul-de-sac when you were little. It was about wandering around with your friends during those summer days and hanging out on those chain-linked swings by the playground. While your childhood lasted, life was about being a kid for as long as you could. It was supposed to fun. This was nothing of the sort.

And it was his fault too. It was completely his fault and nobody else's. That was the worst part. That was what made it hurt the most. Some people could own up to things, but if you could find one flaw ambivalent in Cuddles, it was his inability to take responsibility for his actions. He didn't need this to be his problem. So why did it happen?

"I didn't mean it…" Cuddles muttered quietly. His voice was uncertain at first and then he said it again, this time almost like a fact. "I didn't mean it".

And he hadn't. He couldn't kick his ass feeling sorry for himself. It was his fault, sure, but it was an accident; tragic and unnecessary but overlookable from the grand scheme of things. It wasn't excusable, that was for sure, but he could overlook it. He could overlook it the same way he'd overlooked the bodies that he'd been shooting down throughout the last few days. They were bad thoughts, and if he wanted the sun to be brighter tomorrow, it was best to shake them away. That's what Mom always said at least. You have to forget about it. You can't feel guilty. It's not your fault. It's really no-

The dead guy's eyes suddenly rolled over in his head and looked at him. Cuddles screamed and nearly jumped out of his skin. The guy gurgled in the dirt, spitting up blood and lung tissue onto the road in his last breathe. His eyes were squinted and off-center, almost like he couldn't see anymore.

The mole that suddenly didn't seem so dead looked over at him with pleading, cold eyes and choked out:

"Pleeezzzz…hellmeee…"

He was still alive. His throat looked like a mess of bloody piano wire, but he was still alive. Gurgling but barely moving on the ground, the guy eerily reminded Cuddles of the road kill that the highway patrol always picked up. He was buzzard food; if he left him alone, there was a pretty good chance that the birds would start pecking at him. Then the bugs would come, and after that, it was all downhill. He'll rot. He's really going to rot! Do something! Do something!

Cuddles's mind went wild, making up excuses and dreaming up ideas. He could leave the guy there, but that would only put even more weight on his shoulder. He could carry him back to camp and let him die on the way, but with the uneasy tension that was already in the air at the campsite, that was almost a guaranteed death sentence. He was paranoid now, probably even insane, but he didn't care. This was a mistake and he felt pretty inclined to clean it up.

But then there was another option. He'd never really paid attention in school, usually being the kid who looked at the clock ticking more than what was on the board, but there was one thing that he remembered. It was a word they'd done for vocabulary in English. It was long, complicated and he'd hardly been able to pronounce it when the teacher called on him. It was the meaning of it, however, that had fascinated him since he'd first heard it. Euthanasia. Definition; the act of putting to death painlessly or allowing to die, as by withholding extreme medical measures, a person or animal suffering from an incurable, esp. a painful, disease or condition. God, god, god….

The rifle in his hands suddenly felt very heavy. He tightened his grip on it and made a choice that would haunt him for the rest of his life. The choice was like the flip of a coin. Fifty-fifty chance. Yes or no. And since he was at such close range, there was no way he could miss. It would be an easy shot; a bulls eye. Do it. Just end it. Get rid of the guilt…

"Pleeeeeeez", The Mole croaked again. "Helmee….

Cuddles turned his head away, closed his eyes and fired another shot from the rifle. The gunshot cracked and he felt his ankles being speckled with blood and brains like the feeling of running barefoot through wet grass. He felt a wave of revulsion at the thought and shook it away. On plain recoil from the shot, his whole body seemed to shake and he was knocked off his feet. He turned his head back slowly, staring over at the body with a look of allurement and horror.

Gunsmoke was everywhere. The smell of powder wafted up his nose and Cuddles didn't see an accident in front of him. It wasn't a careless mistake anymore – not an inadvertent rifle shot. It was a corpse. And like it or not, it was a corpse that he had created.

The Mole now had the head of a broken china doll. His skull was clearly exposed on the left side of his face, teeth shining out like an intense radiograph you would get at a doctor's visit. Blood was bubbling out near his left ear, forming a river and trickling around his head in a bold outline. A bright knob of horribly white bone was protruding out near his ear. Filled with cold and panicked fascination, Cuddles could only find one thing to be grateful for: he couldn't see the eyes - they were hidden behind the dead guy's dark sunglasses.

And it wasn't an accident anymore either. It didn't just happen. So many things in Cuddles's life had been accidents, and this wasn't one of them. This, quite frankly, was a murder – and in cold blood at that. A few days ago his mind would be full of worries, but with law and society now belonging to the past and the sky belonging to the birds again, the idea of being caught and trialed for murder was almost laughable. But there's the guilt. Don't forget the guilt, man. You did a good deed, but there's still guilt…..

That couldn't stop him from feeling the pressure of it though. He may not have meant to do it, but heck, how many of those monsters had he killed out there? Easily a good dozen or so. What was saying this guy here was any different? What if everyone was a monster? Feeling his headache worsen, Cuddles thoughts rambled even more for a second, nearly to the point where the craziest idea yet entered his head. He'd shot the guy at close-range. What was saying he couldn't shoot himself?

"But that's crazy", he thought. "It was a mistake! It had to be! You can get rid of it! Just hide the body somewhere! You can make it so no one has to see it! You can toss it! You can bury it away. You…"

His thoughts ended right there when a single cryptic phrase became cemented in his mind. Bury it…

It would get rid of the guilt right away. It would put his accident right under the earth where nobody had to see it. Swallowing hard and looking around, feeling more paranoid than ever, Cuddles took a quick gaze through the forest trees. Nobody was watching him. He perked his long ear and listened down the pinewood trail into the silent, apocalyptic world. He could hear the others talking faintly at the campsite. None of them had any idea what had just happened.

He looked at the rifle in his hand again. It was pretty dull for digging, but if he put the safety on and it spun it around, the blunt end of it would make an mediocre shovel. It definitely wasn't suitable for a burial, but with the way things were going, he was starting to doubt if anyone was going to get a proper burial ever again. Squeezing his fingers against the weapon's sleek, metal coating, he stared over at the dead mole. Then he clicked the rifle on safety.

"Pick a hole", Cuddles muttered under his breath. He stood there for a good while, and by the time he dug the end of the rifle into the ground, he was crying again.

The grave wasn't that hard to dig. A shovel wouldn't have been anything short of miraculous, but Cuddles didn't have one - all he had was a rusted-over rifle and he intended to do his best with it. It only seemed right anyway. The rifle was what had made the accident happen and it only seemed like the right tool to be burying it with. He plunged the spade into the earth over and over, hitting both hard and soft rock as he pushed the rifle as far down as it could go. He was both denting the rifle and bruising his hands during the process, but he didn't care. Someone messed up. Easily redeemable though. Easily redeemable…

He daydreamed a lot while he was digging. He thought about sleepovers he'd had when he was little, he'd thought about their morning confrontation with the raccoon brothers at Happy Burger only a few days ago, he thought about Giggles, but most of all, he thought about being dead and underground. The worms would get to you, the dirt would cave in, and after awhile, you'd rot away and be gone forever; and that wasn't going to happen to him. Cuddles controlled his own life and nobody could step in to stay otherwise.

After what was probably half an hour but seemed like a good few days, he finally finished the hole. It was a shallow grave and the body would probably rise when the rain came, but it was enough to take his mind off his worries. Humming while he worked and dusting off his eyes, he climbed out of the grave and knelt down beside the body. It was tough – especially considering how he wasn't very muscular and was exhausted – but he managed to roll the body over into the ditch. It fell with a soft thud and he shuddered, wondering when the maggots and worms would get to him. Too frightened to even look in and see those hollow eyes staring up at him, he stared kicking in all of the dirt that he'd piled out with the end of the rifle. Lathered in sweat and knowing he probably smelled awful from the lack of showering in the last few days, he finally filled in the last patch of dirt over the hole. Then he stepped back to admire his handiwork. He rubbed his feet against the earth over it, smoothening out the grave and only leaving it as a slight imprint on the trail where the hole had once been. He tried to smooth it out a little more, but considering he'd dug frantically and quickly, he didn't do a very good job. The body was hidden though and that was all that mattered.

Cuddles stood in front of the grave; the grave that he'd created. Staring down at the ground more than the resting place itself, he started to speak.

"I'm sorry I killed you", he said quietly. "I….I didn't mean it. I'm edgy, you know? Being on the road for three days straight does stuff to you. My mind's sort of messed up right now. I miss home. I don't want to keep going on like this. This shouldn't have happened. I mean, I had a future. You had a future. It may not have turned out that great, but it was a future, and you just got that snatched away from you. We all deserve to live. I mean, c'mon, this isn't how life's supposed to work out. A few days ago I was planning a beach trip with my friends and now I'm here giving a mourning speech for a guy I don't even know. Funny how things work out, huh?"

For a second he thought he' d heard a voice answering back from the grave – probably a deep and guttural one like in those movies he'd always watched when people came back from the dead - but it didn't happen. He heard nothing. The grave was simply a lump in the earth that was going to be overlooked by the next person that came along to see it. It was like how the bugs gathered around the stream or the insects made their sounds in the woods. It was a cycle – and it was just going to go on forever. Just like you….

"Not all people are bad", Cuddles said. He'd wiped away the last of his tears. "At least I'm not".

He stood there for about fifteen minutes. Flies started to buzz over the lump of dirt. Crickets chirped. The sun kept setting and nightfall approached. Taking in a breath of fresh pine air, Cuddles slung the rifle over his shoulder and started walking down the trail, feeling welcomed by the oily stench of stew coming from the campsite and the idea of his girlfriend waiting for him. By the time he was halfway there, he was whistling.

Even in the weeks to come, nobody would ever find out about the grave..

A/N: I'm sorry for the lack of progress with this story in the recent months. I want everyone to know that this is in no way abandoned. In fact, it's one of my top priorities right now. I'm just been insanely busy with school starting and it's been hard to find time to write.

And seriously, thanks for all the great feedback everyone! It really motivates me to keep going with the story knowing that people read and enjoy what I write!

And be prepared to get a clear idea of where the rain came from in the next chapter. :D