Chapter Nineteen

Cover

Cloud cover settled in shortly before sunset. It came in a rush during the last few hours of the day and blocked out the remnants of daylight and the oncoming light of the pale moon, dousing the city in stifled blackness. They were dark clouds. Threatening. Enough so that we decided to find shelter earlier than we normally would have done.

That was fine with me. The sooner the better.

The night's choice of residence turned out to be a small church on the corner of a residential neighborhood, not too far away from a shopping center we raided for food for dinner. The small religious center seemed to have been partially converted into a somewhat secured shelter—like the motel from the night before, the windows and all other means of entry had been heavily boarded up, save for a small back door hidden in a far corner in the back. Sleeping bags and random personal belongings and camping supplies littered the floors on the inside in between the rows of pews, scattered about rather haphazardly. Much of the religious paraphernalia had seemingly been removed from their usual places and stored in the corner in the front of the chapel, but many of the things were upturned and laying on their sides or sporting missing pieces and cracked faces. It looked as if those who had been there last had left in a great hurry and a great mess, but I was relieved to see that besides an unhealthy amount of blood smeared on the walls and floor, at least there weren't any corpses. On the inside, anyway. The area surrounding it had its fair share of decay.

We climbed up a small staircase in a back room to the second floor, closing the door and barricading it on the way through. The outside interior of the first floor may have been protected, but there was always the chance something would find its way through, and we wanted to be extra sure. The upstairs windows had also been secured, and the loft was a bit less messy and included, to our immense relief, a somewhat dwindled supply of food, extra bedding, and, as I had come to greatly appreciate when it was present, a camping cooking stove.

It was perfect, just what I needed for the next part of my plan.

But that was for after dinner.

"Eaten enough?"

Terrence sat his bowl down and leaned back against the wall with a sigh, smiling guiltily and looking as content as he could in the present circumstances, albeit still exhausted. We had cooked up as many cans of stew as we could get our hands on, more than I knew we needed, but even then, Terrence had managed to eat most of it. He had an unusually large appetite, even for a guy, which was certainly saying something as I had grown up with brothers and guy friends and knew just what sort of large appetites many guys generally had. However, there was just enough stew left to fill another bowl, which I hastily did under the curious eye of my companion.

"No, it's not for me," I said, rolling my eyes, answering the stupid, bemused grin on his face. I stood, and the weight of the pills in my pocket seemed to hang heavily against my thigh even though they couldn't have weighed more than a few grams all together. I had slipped some in there earlier under the ruse of unpacking my backpack and getting out my usual cold medication when we had arrived. I had yet to tell Terrence about what I was planning. I wasn't sure why I was being so sneaky about it. What was the reason to hide what I was thinking? It wasn't like he was doing anything about our situation. If I didn't do something now, then it seemed nothing would get done…until it was too late, anyway.

Still, it was with an uneasy feeling as I faced him, balancing the bowl of food carefully in my hands, and debated on what to say to him next.

"I'm…going to stick this outside," I said, almost wincing at the pathetic explanation. It didn't make me feel any better when Terrence's expression turned from curious surprise to a look that told me he thought I was crazy. He leaned forward, eyeing me carefully, the question on his face utterly obvious.

I took a deep breath, fighting between the lie and the truth. In the end, neither came out. "Terrence, I—why haven't you done anything about the Infected following us?"

One of the many questions that had been so long time in coming burst forth before I had time to think about it. Immediately, Terrence's expression fell, and I thought I saw something close off behind his eyes. Almost as if a part of him had shut down. It was a vaguely familiar expression. One I knew I had seen before from him. And it was so sudden that it took me a few moments to process what I wanted to say next.

"I didn't mean…I wasn't blaming you," I added hastily, shifting the weight of the bowl of food between hands. Even as I said the words, I knew that they didn't address the truth behind his sudden change in attitude. "I just…wondered why…just…never mind."

I sighed, losing what little energy I could spare in driving forward the argument. I suddenly felt weary. Ready and willing to give up. The questions I wanted to ask—whether or not the two Infected following us were for sure from the fight a week ago, whether or not Terrence actually knew why they were following us, why he had even bothered to help them in the first place—dissipated completely. I had nothing left in me to keep me talking. That was it, then. That was why I hadn't told him what I was planning—if he disagreed, it would only take valuable time and energy to try to understand why. Energy that I did not have. For the first time, I felt the definitive leak of exhaustion and weariness at having a companion who couldn't talk in a way that didn't force me to think more than I had to. It was shameful, and I felt guilty, almost as if I was being unappreciative of everything he had done for me. I wanted to say something more, I wanted to keep plowing forward as I would have done before. But instead, I simply turned and headed down the stairs. A scuffling and quick, heavy footsteps behind me told me that Terrence was following unbidden, and I saw the light of our flashlight light up the stairs from behind me as I carefully made my way down. I kept my eyes turned from his face, though, even as he hesitantly moved aside the barriers we had shoved against the door leading into the chapel and the back door leading outside, and I tried not to think at how strange it was for him to not continue questioning me, for him to not attempt to figure out what I was up to. Maybe he was tired, too. Tired, of trying to figure out how to get across to me the words he could no longer say.

I told him to wait at the door and keep an eye out, reassuring him that I would only go a few feet out into the near darkness. Then, raising my scarf around the lower part of my face to try to prevent breaking out into a coughing fit, I stepped out and carefully rested the bowl down upon the cold, lifeless pavement just at the edge of the flashlight's range, hesitated, and then quickly, smoothly transferred the pills in my pocket into the food in the bowl, mixing them with the serving spoon I had used to dole up the stew. I was quite sure there was enough of a dosage in there to knock out a horse, taking into consideration that fact that the food might inactivate some of it before it reached anyone's stomach. If it ever did.

Hopefully, it would.

The deed done, I stood and paused for a moment to stare out into the darkness, breathing slowly, my breath forming puffs of white mist that were illuminated by the pale flashlight cutting through the black. I felt so small suddenly. I felt…I felt as if I were trapped again in my mind. In my sickness. But there was no waking up from this dream. I wrapped my arms around me, shivering and staring with tired eyes. The darkness seemed to encompass me, pressing down, swirling about like the teasing, frigid wind that had brought in the storm.

What was I doing?

I looked down at the bowl of drugged food, feeling numb with cold and disbelief. How had this idea even come to me? And how…how could I expect it to work? There were so many loose variables. So many things that could go wrong. That could not even happen. What if the creatures hunting us didn't even notice the meager offering? What if they weren't hungry? What if they were, and the ate the food, and the medication ended up killing them?

I felt my throat constrict. It felt as if I would be possibly killing Terrence, as if our hunters were on the same level as he was in my mind. But that was stupid. Foolish. I would never do anything to hurt Terrence, let alone anything that could even remotely kill him, and out of all the hundreds—thousands—of Infected I had encountered, he had been the only one I had seen to retain his humanity. These things following us…no, they couldn't be the same. What were the odds they somehow shared whatever trait Terrence had that had preserved the person he was before the infection?

But it hadn't seemed like he had been human at first, had it? It had taken him weeks to get this far back to what he had once been. It had taken days for him to even act human enough for me to see him as being a person. For all I knew, maybe there were more Infected out there like him. A lot more. More who had somehow, someway, found a way to retain a miniscule, glorious, hugely significant thread of their sanity.

And if that was the case, would this and everything I had done that was like it…be considered murder?

I felt something heavy rest on my shoulder and I whirled around, nearly losing balance and falling over if not for the large hand that reached out to grip my arm, steadying me. I blinked and looked up into the concerned expression of my friend, my Hunter, and I realized that for some stupid reason, I was close to tears.

"I'm fine," I said hastily, giving him a wane smile and passing my arm across my eyes. "Just the cold…and you know, I'm tired and all. Makes my eyes water." I looked down at the bowl at my feet. The steam from the once hot stew had started to fade as the cold seeped in through it, chilling it like a refrigerator. I turned away from it and looked back towards the direction of the open door. "Let's go back inside and get some sleep."

Only I didn't sleep that night. Not really. I couldn't. I was exhausted and aching all over, and my mind and body pleaded for sleep, but I just couldn't manage to drift off into unconsciousness. It seemed hours that I lay there, trying not to toss and turn too much in order to keep from waking Terrence who, after much blatant demanding and begging on my part, had fallen asleep shortly after we had piled together every clean sleeping bag and pillow we could find and turned in. Eventually, though, I found that I couldn't lie there any longer. I had to get up.

Luckily, Terrence's grip on me tonight wasn't that difficult to carefully wiggle out of without disturbing him, and with a sleeping bag wrapped tightly around my heavily clothed form, I carefully plucked up the flashlight from where I had left it at my side and picked my way through the darkness to where the single window sat overlooking the back of the church. Not that there was really any light to see anything. For all I knew, I was just staring at wood. But it at least gave me the feeling that I was…doing something.

Really can't sit still, can I, I thought to myself with a sigh, searching the black. At least I wouldn't be encountering any scenes from a horror movie tonight unless there was a really, really tall Infected with detachable eyes or something. Not that I would be able to see it even if there was.

I'd certainly hear it, though. Hopefully.

I rested my forehead against the wood, ignoring the fact that I had started to shiver with only my clothing and a sleeping bag to guard against the coldness. I didn't have time for worrying about temperature. I needed to think. I had to understand. Somehow. I had put off facing this problem for too long already.

So. Terrence had led us to that fight for a reason. He had been so focused in doing so. So determined. And then he had had us leave that other Hunter and the Smoker alone. He had even deliberately stopped me from trying to harm them. But he hadn't even batted an eye at seeing the other three Hunters destroyed. There was something different about that Hunter and Smoker, then. Something only he could sense. Or maybe…did he know them somehow? Before the infection had hit? Had he perhaps recognized their…smell? Voice?

Was that it? Was that the realization I felt I had been missing all along?

The thought was disturbing. Less the fact that he could sense something like that from blocks away and more the fact that I was beginning to strongly suspect the worse—that there really was something going on here that I didn't know, that had taken me a week to figure out. I twisted slightly in my cocoon of fading warmth, my mind bursting with new theories and thoughts that tired me out as quickly as anything else could. Maybe…it wasn't exactly implausible. It was a pretty small world, after all, despite how insignificant I currently felt in his empty city, and it would make sense about why he hadn't done anything about them following us. Perhaps he was scared to face them, worried that further confronting former friends in their Infected state would send him off the deep end once again, even though I had been sure he was over that by now…

I berated myself for a brief moment at not having taken a closer look at the Infecteds' faces, but even if I had, their state of filth and mutation would most likely have made it impossible for me to match them with any of the pictures Terrence had shown me, even though I had committed so many to memory. Regardless, I felt certain that if Terrence did know that Hunter and Smoker, if that were the reason for all of this, they would have been in the pictures somewhere, tucked away in those physical manifestations of his memories.

I wished so badly that Terrence could talk to confirm what I was thinking. To just flat out tell me so I wouldn't have to keep guessing anymore. But then, if he could talk, he would have told me ages ago what was going on. He would have been able to explain a week ago why he had done what he had done when he had done it, why this whole issue with being followed was happening to us now.

Wouldn't he?

But then, if they were friends, why did he seem so nervous? So worried? It occurred to me that the reason he had woken up in such a fit from his nap earlier that day was because I hadn't been in his range of sight when he had woken. Had he been worried they had gotten to me while his guard was down? Maybe in that case they weren't friends. Or maybe…

Maybe, maybe, maybe.

I sighed, grinding my back teeth in frustration. Whatever. It didn't matter. Whether friends or enemies or something completely different, I prayed to whatever god there was, whatever god could possibly let something like this happen, that my feeble plan, filled with holes as it was, would somehow work out.

There would be no way of knowing until morning, though.

Wearily, I glanced down at my watch, lighting up the glow-in-the-dark face to read the time. It was still a long way to dawn.

I settled against the wall, staring blearily into a void, trying to force my mind to shut up and let be the flurry of thoughts and scenarios my troubled had unearthed. Funny, though, that I would think about god now of all times. It was probably because we were in a church. I couldn't say I had been in many churches like this. My family had never really been very religious. That wasn't to say we were bad people. We just…didn't have much of a religious basing.

Not that it really mattered right now. Even if I did have some established belief in god, what good would it do me now? There was no god in a dead city. No god left in a broken world.

This depressing thought effectively quashed all the other frantic nonsense running through me. It was strangely a relief. It seemed that at last, maybe, I would be able to get to sleep now. The time would certainly go faster. I settled my back against the wall, huddling down and waiting to see how tired I was. As soon as I started nodding off, I would return back to my place at Terrence's side. It was certainly warmer, there.

It wasn't long, though, before I was jarred out of my partial meditation by a strangled, feeble whimpering coming from where I had left Terrence.

Immediately, I sat up, all weariness forgotten as I listened through the darkness. My heart throbbed in my chest. What…?

"Terrence?" I whispered harshly into the stillness.

There was another whimper. Then a soft, pathetic whine accompanied by the frantic rustling of cloth.

I lunged to my feet, feeling around the floor for my katana and the flashlight and flicking it on while in the same moment rushing to his side, ready for trouble, expecting something to be hurting him, something to have snuck in through some unnoticed back way or past me up the stairs in the darkness after somehow miraculously breaking in with no noise.

But within two and a half steps, I realized that we were still alone in the church loft. I stopped mid step, the weight of the katana familiar in my hand, my light shinning on Terrence's twitching form amidst the sleeping bags and pillows. Alone. He whimpered again, turning about, an arm weakly grabbing at his side where I had been earlier. His eyes were still closed.

A nightmare?

I tossed the katana down and returned to where I had been sleeping before, gently reaching out and taking one of his hands in mine. His fingers hesitated for only a moment before squeezing mine painfully tight. He stilled almost immediately after, and the soft whimpering died from his throat.

I stared at him for a long time after that, uncertain what to think, what to feel, and it was the numb coldness piercing my skin like stabbing needles that eventually brought me back. I was freezing now without that thick sleeping bag to shield me. I could feel a cough tickling the back of my throat, and I decided it was time to try to get back to sleep. With my free hand, I flicked off the flashlight and reached about and pulled the sleeping bags up around me, nestling back into his warmth, ready and silently begging for sleep.

It never came.

Morning came as a gray dawn, peering through the meager cracks in the boarded window. By the looks of it, the cloud cover had stuck around, which explained why it wasn't as cold as it usually was. Still freezing, but not to the point where I was sure one minute more in it would give me hypothermia. Terrence woke shortly after the sun rose in a recognizably more rested and agreeable mood, and I tried my best to look as if I had gotten a full night's sleep as well. However, it didn't help much that I felt high strung. Nervous. Strained. Terrence noticed. I saw him glancing at me worriedly as I rushed us through breakfast and through packing up, but I ignored him for the most part, merely giving him a bland, half-hearted smile when he at last got fed up with my avoiding his gaze and came over to poke me in the shoulder.

"I'm fine. I just…I want to get going," I explained when the expression on his face told me that once again he didn't believe me. "We're really close. We might even make it to Little Beverly sometime today if we get going."

I forced myself to maintain his gaze as he scrutinized my expression, as if trying to catch me in a lie. But it wasn't necessarily a lie. Just…not the entire truth.

I was very interested to get going, but it wasn't entirely due to the reason I had told him.

After ensuring we had everything with us, we started down the stairs and removed all the barriers within our way, and all the while I felt as if I was on the verge of jumping off a cliff, that thrill of expectancy.

Calm down. I'm just getting my hopes up, I cautioned myself logically. There were too many variables with that plan. It would be a miracle if…

As we exited out the back door on our way out to find the world gray but gratefully still unblemished by snow or other signs of a storm, I braced myself and immediately searched the ground for the bowl I had left on the pavement the night before, feeling my heart twist expectantly, my stomach clench in foreboding. My breath caught, drawing in the stale, new-clothing smell from the scarf around my lower face. I stopped mid step, stilling myself in order to look more closely, just to be sure, knowing that Terrence was looking around in interest as well, but no matter how many times I looked, no matter where I looked, the result was still the same, and I felt a savage sense of triumph that roared through me, burning my blood and my mind.

The bowl-and the drugged food within it-was gone.

Author's Babble: I apologize to all the people whose reviews I didn't respond to last run. I was getting to them, but I have such a slow internet that it became more and more daunting and so never got done. I'm sorry! I am terrible.

Anyway, the last poll question ended up having a wide variety of answers that were all fairly interesting. I'll have to see that I draw up over break—it's been such a long time since I've drawn anything, and now I have a few ideas. Also, for anyone who missed it, I posted a very sketchy early version of Terrence and Eden in my DeviantArt's scrap gallery. I wasn't going to say anything until I finished coloring it, but it doesn't look like that's going to happen any time soon. Anyway. Poll question!

What's your favorite Infected and Survivor from the games and why? Also, feel free to include yours favorite survivor quote. I do love them, and I usually never get to hear what the survivors are saying—my gaming friends are yelling too loud. Usually at John when he lights one of us on fire. Never fails.